Unified Communications, Resiliency and Simplified Operations

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switch is a midrange modular platform for unified communications. It is designed for high resiliency, simplified operations, and maximum investment protection with backward and forward compatibility across generations.

Compare Supervisor and Chassis Models

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switch extends a comprehensive set of intelligent network services to the network edge (the wiring closet), helping businesses of all sizes deploy secure, resilient, and scalable unified data, voice, and video networks. Key features include:

• Secure unified communications offers extensive integrated services and features to optimize and scale the network:
  • Power over Ethernet (PoE): Get comprehensive support for a broad range of PoE end devices, including 802.11n wireless access points, and up to 30W PoE per port for future applications.
  • Intelligent services: Optimize and secure your network with hardware-based quality of service, multicast, security, IPv6 and integrated management features
  • Scalability: Grow your network and services with up to 384 PoE ports, up to 34 10 Gigabit Ethernet capability, and ample hardware resources to support concurrent services.
• Resiliency: Hardware and software based resiliency features minimize planned and unplanned network downtime
  
  • Hardware resiliency: All critical components, such as supervisors, power supplies, and fans, are redundant.
  • Software resiliency: Subsecond supervisor switchover (SSO) and Cisco In Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) occur without dropping IP calls.
  • Extensive security features: Network disruptions from security threats are minimized.
• Simplified operations designed to lower total cost of ownership for first-time configurations, ongoing operations, and troubleshooting:
  • Embedded Event Manager (EEM): Simplify both routine and extraordinary events with a customized approach to EEMevent detection, recovery, and automation.
  • Operational features: Minimize operational and troubleshooting tasks with CPU monitoring, Cisco ISSU, IOS IP SLA, Smartports, AutoQoS, Remote Switched Port Analyzer, Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discovery, Discovery Protocol, and CiscoWorks.
  • Hot-swappable components: Supervisor, line cards, power supplies, and fan tray are hot-swappable.
• Investment protection - Extensive investment protection with backward and forward compatibility across Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series generations dating back to 1999, maximizing return on investment:
  
  • Backward and forward compatibility: Mix new Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series line cards and classic line cards in the same chassis without performance degradation.
  • Investment enhancement: Upgrade currently deployed classic line card features with a simple upgrade to the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6-E.
  • IPv4 and IPv6: The switch is optimized for simultaneous IPv4/IPv6 deployment or migration.

For centralized management, Cisco Network Assistant simplifies configuration and administration. Available at no charge, the Cisco Network Assistant provides configuration wizards that greatly simplify the implementation of intelligent network services.