SAN JOSE, Calif. -- August 30, 1999 -- Cisco Systems, Inc., today announced new capabilities and functionality for the Catalyst. 6000 Family of multilayer switches. These enhancements enable the Catalyst 6000 Family to deploy cost-effective web scaling techniques, integrate separate voice and data networks and enhance the multilayer switching performance for an intelligent end to end network. The result is an integrated network that can intelligently handle the continuous wave of advanced applications in the area of E-commerce and converged data, voice and video networks.
"Intranet/Internet-based applications like e-commerce, web-based content distribution, and converged voice/video/data networks are driving new business models," said Michael Speyer, Associate Director at the Yankee Group. "Cisco's Catalyst 6000 Family offers customers a singular platform that integrates a wide range of intelligent features and functionality that spans from the wiring closet to the backbone."
The new products announced today include the Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC), the Policy Feature Card (PFC) and OC-12 ATM uplink modules. The MSFC and PFC operate in conjunction with the Catalyst 6000 Supervisor Engine and, like the new OC-12 ATM modules, are deployable across the Catalyst 6000 Family
Efficient Server Switching and Content Availability
Because of the need for scalable web services and flexible bandwidth, more and more organizations are utilizing intelligent server switching and web caching techniques. Cisco's solution includes the Catalyst 6000 Family with MSFC and PFC coupled with Cisco LocalDirector and Catalyst-optimized web caching technologies.Specifically, the solution is a combination of high performance hardware and optimized software that intelligently balances the load of user traffic across multiple TCP/IP application servers. LocalDirector works in conjunction with the PFC to deliver wire-speed traffic direction by populating the PFC flow cache and switching packets in hardware. This technique is known as Accelerated Server Load Balancing and enables the Catalyst 6000 Family to deliver wire-speed server load balancing at rates of 15 million packets per second.
Catalyst 6000 Family switches equipped with MSFCs also provide transparent Web Cache redirection using Cisco's Web Cache Communication Protocol v2 (WCCP). WCCP is the industry's leading web-cache redirection protocol that localizes network traffic and provides network-intelligent load distribution across multiple network caches for maximized content availability and decreased bandwidth costs.
Intelligent Switching to Scale the Network
The MSFC and PFC provide the performance, scalability, and intelligent services of Cisco IOS. software on the Catalyst 6000 Family. With these two enabling solutions, customers will have the essential flexibility and vital features necessary to deploy the Catalyst 6000 Family in campus wiring-closets, enterprise backbones and/or service provider networks.As a key component of the CiscoAssure end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) and policy-based security solution, the PFC can identify user applications - such as voice, enterprise resource planning (ERP), or multicast - and classify traffic with the appropriate priority level. It can also enable admission control in the wiring closet to prevent unauthorized applications from being allowed onto the network.
The PFC supports advanced QoS features such as packet classification, marking, scheduling, and congestion avoidance as well as hardware-based protocol filtering, which enables intelligent broadcast control, increased resource utilization and wire-speed network performance.
Additionally, with the Policy Feature Card (PFC), voice traffic can now be detected and classified as highest-priority traffic and when coupled with IP-telephony solutions from Cisco, customers can now benefit from the financial savings of a converged voice/video/data network. All Catalyst 6000 Family switches also support the power infrastructure to supply power to every 10/100 port to power next-generation IP-telephony handsets. This is similar to how traditional handsets operate today and means that no chassis upgrade will be required for today's Catalyst 6000 Family customers adopt campus telephony solutions.
The MSFC - in combination with the PFC - provides 15 million packets per second of forwarding performance for IP, IPX, and IP Multicast traffic, in addition to supporting multiprotocol routing for AppleTalk, DecNet, and Vines. The MSFC also supports a full list of routing protocols including RIP-I and II, OSPF, IGRP, EIGRP, BGP4 and IS-IS to address both enterprise and service provider requirements. Wire speed access control lists are also supported to maximize system security.
For high-availability, the MSFC supports Cisco IOS Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) for routing redundancy between MSFCs in the same chassis, across Catalyst 6000 Family switches, or between a Catalyst 6000 Family switch and a standalone Cisco router.
Unlike other solutions on the market, the MSFC supports wire-speed traffic statistics collection and accounting with no impact on switching performance. These data points enable enterprise customers to perform traffic engineering and monitor network performance, and provide service provider customers with resource-utilization data for billing and charge-back applications.
Also announced today are two OC-12 ATM uplink modules (single mode and multimode versions). These ATM OC-12 dual-PHY uplink modules provide high-performance LANE and MPOA services for mixed media backbones requiring both frame and ATM-based connectivity. With the ATM uplink, customers can take advantage of wire-speed PVC traffic shaping as well as peerless LANE performance.
Pricing, Availability and Further Information
The Multilayer Switch Feature Card and Policy Feature Card on a Catalyst 6000 Supervisor Engine are available now for $29,995. The OC-12 uplinks start at $21,995. Further information on the Catalyst 6000 Family can be found at http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/cisco/mkt/switch/cat/6000/.Cisco Systems
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