Cisco Targets Wiring Closet With Lower-Cost Catalyst 4500

Cisco Systems is looking to help partners continue their sales push into the wiring closet by launching a new product in its Catalyst 4500 Series to offer entry into modular switching.

Unveiled on Wednesday, the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine 6L-E (Supervisor 6-E Lite) is a high-performance, price-optimized, entry-level switch for rich-media collaboration. It also offers new energy and operational efficiency to the wiring closet. The 6L-E, along with a new 48-port 10/100/1000 line card, enables 30-watt Power-over-Ethernet support for devices such as videophones, dual-band wireless access points, building service devices and video surveillance cameras.

According to Jennifer Geisler, senior manager of network systems marketing for Cisco, the new addition to the Catalyst portfolio neutralizes the price differential between modular and fixed stackable switches. In the past, she said, modular switches were perceived as a premium and adding the Catalyst 4500 6L-E to the roster helps cut the price of modular switching, enabling partners to make more sales into the wiring closet.

"It's all about giving customers choices and letting the architecture, not the price, decide the purchase," she said.

The new Catalyst product, Geisler said, is part of Cisco's initiative to better enable partners to sell Catalyst switching products. The new product, coupled with Web-based training sessions and other Cisco programs that target the core network, is designed to help partners capitalize on organizations' needs in the wiring closet and the network core.

In the past, some partners found the 4500 line price-prohibitive, but Geisler said the new additions can help them target application-intensive wiring closet deployments for a lower price. Exact pricing figures were not immediately available.

Geisler said the Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E offers similar functionality to many other Catalyst 4500 products and will be available in lower-priced product bundles to help fuel partner sales. Geisler added that the 4500 6L-E is upgradable to everything in a standard Catalyst 4500 with line cards and other add-ons.

The Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E offers centralized 280 Gbps switching capacity with 225 million of packet-per-second throughput; IPv6 support in hardware; operation at 6 or 24 Gbps per line-card slot; dual 10-Gigabit Ethernet uplinks; and quality of service. It also is compatible with classic Cisco Catalyst 4500 line cards, chassis and power supplies for investment protection, Cisco said. "It gets 4500 modular switching into the wiring closet for a lower price," she said.

Along with launching the Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E, Cisco on Wednesday said it had extended its Smart Call Home location service and its EnergyWise energy management offering to the Catalyst 4500 Series. Smart Call Home can lower costs and reduce downtime by letting devices detect problems and notify Cisco support teams for resolution, while EnergyWise is an energy-management architecture to control power costs and energy usage in the network and other areas of the business.

For the Catalyst 6500 Series, Cisco has boosted the flexibility and functionality in campus backbone deployments, adding new network analysis module (NAM) capabilities that can boost application performance by offering visibility into voice applications, traffic analysis and segmented MPLS networks.

Cisco also unveiled three new small business routers. The Cisco 800 VDSL2 and the 890 Series ISR are two devices that offer faster broadband options and boosted performance with integrated security and wireless connectivity, while the Cisco 1861W ISR is an SMB voice router offering 802.11g wireless support to better tie together wired and wireless networks and increase throughput for greater mobility.

Additionally, Cisco added support for HSPA networks with the Cisco 3G Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) for the ISR to enable the use of 3G wireless networks for increased bandwidth and higher performance.

Cisco also added EnergyWise support on the ISR through its EtherSwitch modules.

For applications, Cisco revealed that Singlewire Software had developed a solution on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP) for the ISR, building its InformaCast application that can simultaneously send an audio stream and/or text message to multiple IP phones, Atlas IP speakers, the Desktop Notification System or overhead paging systems.

And last, Cisco has enhanced its Unified Communications offerings for better mobility and collaboration, adding Unified SIP Proxy to reduce UC deployment costs and adding new voice signatures on the IP Security Network Module to make voice more secure. Other enhancements include new mobility and video features on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express and new time card management capabilities on Cisco Unity Express.

"Cisco's core business in routing and switching is the platform of our customers' IT infrastructures," said Marie Hattar, Cisco vice president of network systems and security, of the Catalyst and ISR updates, in a statement. "As our customers become more mobile, collaborative and sophisticated in the way they do business, the role of Cisco's networking solutions increases and is allowing our customers to catch market transitions, drive operational efficiency and achieve greater energy savings."

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