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Cisco Systems is overhauling its most popular network switching platforms as it moves to jump-start slumping U.S. enterprise sales.
Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said last month that the company has seen a slowdown in the U.S. enterprise market.
"The U.S. enterprise, probably as a surprise to no one, is experiencing some softness ... We expect and continue to expect U.S. enterprise growth to be very lumpy both by U.S. areas and industries moving forward," Chambers said during a conference call to discuss the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor's first quarter fiscal 2008 financial results.
Just ahead of the release of its financial results, Cisco unveiled new technology that will add virtualization, increased capacity and improved performance to its mainstay modular switch platforms.
The vendor is bringing virtualization to enterprise networks with a new module for its flagship Catalyst 6500 switch line. It is also rolling out a series extension that represents the next generation of its Catalyst 4500 platform. Together, the products mark the next phase of Cisco's Campus Communications Fabric framework for enterprise networks and are driven by customers' use of new technologies such as collaboration and Web 2.0, said Tere Bracco, senior manager of Cisco's switch portfolio.
The product line enhancements were designed to enable customers to build on their existing Cisco investments, she said, noting that the vendor has sold over one million chassis between the Catalyst 6500 and 4500 switch families. "Rip and replace is not an option when you have an installed base of one million switches," Bracco said.
The new Catalyst 6500 Series Virtual Switching System (VSS) 1440 adds virtualization to the portfolio that enables solution providers to combine multiple physical switches to act as one virtual switch, providing increased capacity and redundancy.
The functionality is enabled by the new Catalyst 6500 Series Virtual Switching Supervisor Engine 720 with 10-Gigabit Ethernet, which enables VSS 1440 to scale to support bandwidth capacity of up to 1.44 Tbits per second.
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