Cisco adds to Catalyst 5000 line

By Jim Duffy
Network World Fusion, 05/14/99

LAS VEGAS -- Cisco this week announced enhancements to its Catalyst 5000 LAN switches for enterprise wiring closets.

New products include the Catalyst Supervisor Engine IIG and IIIG, which offer wire-speed IP, IPX and IP Multicast switching across subnets, gigabit connectivity, Layer 3 and 4 services and multiprotocol routing.

Cisco also rolled out a 24-port 10Base-FL card for fiber connectivity and Catalyst 5.1 software with enhanced quality-of-service (QoS) features.

Cisco is shipping one million Catalyst 5000 ports each month, says Marthin DeBeer, director of product marketing at Cisco. The Catalyst 5000 is the most widely installed Ethernet switch in the industry, according to various market research firms.

The Supervisor Engine IIG and IIIG enable traffic like voice to be identified, classified and prioritized at the edge of the network, Cisco says. Traffic can also be filtered by protocol on a per-port basis.

The Supervisor IIG supports modular 100M bit/sec and 1000M bit/sec uplink options and features embedded NetFlow packet accounting Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Previously, NetFlow was available only as an optional daughtercard for the supervisor engine.

The Supervisor IIIG has interchangeable Gigabit Interface Converters. This lets users configure their wiring closets with a range of physical media, from Fast Ethernet TX or FX to Gigabit Ethernet SX, LX/LH and ZX, which can reach up to 100 km, Cisco says.

Cisco is also adding its IOS 12.0 routing software to the new Supervisor Engine IIG and IIIG via an optional Route Switch Feature Card (RSFC). The RSFC gives the new supervisor engines multiprotocol routing capability. This daughtercard lets network managers deploy switching modules in all chassis slots instead of burning a slot on a Cisco Route Switch Module, which was previously required. Cisco will still offer the RSM because it supports optional WAN port adapters; the supervisor engines with the RSFC currently do not.

The Catalyst RSFC supports IP, IPX, IP Multicast, AppleTalk, DECNet and VINES. Additional features of the RSFC include access lists, fast convergence times, resilience and other IOS services, Cisco says.

Cisco also plans to ship a 15M packet/sec Multilayer Switching Feature Card for the Catalyst 6000 switches in July. The MSFC will be offered as an alternative to the current 6M packet/sec Multilayer Switching Module, the performance of which has been criticized by some users.

Version 5.1 of the Catalyst software, meanwhile, adds wire-speed IP, IPX and IP Multicast switching as well as enhanced QoS features, Cisco says. This functionality efficiently distributes multimedia traffic such as video and voice throughout the network, Cisco says.

QoS mechanisms in Version 5.1, such as Weighted Random Early Detection, Traffic Recognition and Traffic Classification let network administrators prioritize applications through centralized policy control and automated policy deployment, Cisco says. The Catalyst 5.1 software also supports existing Catalyst 5000 supervisor engines.

Lastly, the 24-port 10Base-FL line card works in any Catalyst 5000 switch. This option is twice the density of previously available modules and uses the MT-RJ small form-factor connectors. This module will let customers deploy fiber to the desktop in a more cost-effective manner, Cisco says.

The prices for the Catalyst Supervisor Engine IIG and IIIG are $8,995 and $13,995 respectively. The Catalyst RSFC lists for $17,995 and the 24-port 10Base-FL switching module is priced at $7,495. All products will be available in June.

Separately, Cisco will be adding a number of voice interfaces to its Catalyst switches over the next 12 months, DeBeer says. Cisco will be adding trunks to PBXs, trunks to the public switched telephone network as well as voice over IP and analog interfaces, he says.

Cisco will add enhancements to the switches for high availability, as well as to handle latency, jitter and delay for voice traffic, DeBeer says. Cisco will be able to provide 99.99% availability for voice over LAN switches within 18 months. Cisco will also be able to scale its campus telephony systems up to 10,000 users in 12 months, he says.

Currently, Cisco's Selsius network PBX can support up to 1,000 users.

"Our challenge will be to take [packet telephony] to the mass market," DeBeer says. "We need to articulate all the right reasons why users should be doing this."

Such reasons include cost savings and scalability, among others, he says.