Cisco this week is unveiling enhancements to two of its higher-end Catalyst switching lines designed to improve the products’ ability to support real-time enterprise communication and collaboration.

The enhancements include virtual switching for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and essentially a refresh of the Catalyst 4500 line. The upgrades are intended to usher those two lines, which are long-in-the-tooth yet highly profitable for Cisco, into the world of collaboration and unified communications, applications that require higher network performance and limited downtime.

“Both of these products were developed pre-Y2K,” says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at the Yankee Group. “Foundry’s probably had four or five product releases in that time. So you could argue that the products’ are not nearly as state-of-the-art as some of the other ones.”

Refreshing the Catalyst 6500

The Catayst 6500 Virtual Switching System (VSS) 1440 is enabled by the new Virtual Switching Supervisor Engine 720 with integrated 10Gbps Ethernet uplinks. This capability effectively allows users to combine multiple Catalyst 6500 switches into one, thereby pooling switch bandwidth to increase performance.

“They are abstracting the physical number of devices from the logical management of those devices, which allows an enterprise to operationally streamline the management of Catalyst devices,” says Rob Whiteley, senior analyst of enterprise networking at Forrester Research. “This is critical in the data center, where switch proliferation is very difficult to manage.”

The VSS 1440, which had been expected for two years, scales system bandwidth capacity to as much as 1.44Tbps, Cisco says. It is also designed to simplify operational management by enabling multiple Catalyst 6500 switches to share a single-point of management, single routing instance and single IP address, while eliminating the dependence on Spanning Tree and “first-hop” redundancy protocols, such as Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol.

The integrated 10Gbps uplinks and higher performance hit home with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which has a purchase order out for 30 of the enhanced switches.