Datasheet

Cisco Catalyst 4500 Classic Fast Ethernet Fiber Line Cards

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series offers a variety of classic Fast Ethernet line cards with fiber interfaces optimized

for desktops, branch office backbones, and servers for enterprise and commercial switching solutions and service

provider metropolitan Ethernet networks. Fast Ethernet line cards include various densities of wire-speed 10/100,

100-FX, 100BASE-LX10, and 100BASE-BX-D options.

Features and Benefits

Functional Transparency

Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches offer an extensive line of modules that support numerous speeds and

physical media combinations. These line cards are functionally transparent; all the packet processing, queuing,

buffering, and QoS occur in the supervisor engine. To that end, both classic and E-Series line cards acquire the

features and capabilities of the installed supervisor engine. For example, a classic line card previously deployed

with a classic supervisor engine using four queues per port will automatically have capability for eight queues per

port if redeployed with a Supervisor Engine 8-E/7-E/6-E. This architecture enables customers to easily upgrade all

Ethernet line cards on their Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series systems to higher layer switching functions by adding a

new supervisor engine. The simple design of the line cards results in a very high mean time between failures

(MTBF), helping ensure high availability for a single connection to an end user.

Modular Versatility

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series is a centralized architecture that is designed to provide dedicated wire-speed

bandwidth to each line-card slot within the chassis. Each line card has a dedicated bandwidth to the supervisor

engine for packet processing. All network data that flows into the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series through the various

line cards goes through the supervisor engine for processing, even in single-slot port-to-port communications. All

line cards have some per-slot bandwidth that allows network administrators to design a system that offers full

dedicated bandwidth-to-server and switch-to-switch applications and still provides high performance over

subscribed gigabit to the desktop.

A modular centralized design allows customers to use their investment in high-performance line cards across the

entire line of Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series chassis and supervisor engines. For example, line cards that shipped with

the original Cisco Catalyst 4003 Switch in 1999 will work in the Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series chassis. Because of

the centralized architecture of the Cisco Catalyst 4500, all line cards deployed in a chassis benefit from the

enhanced features that the supervisor engine provides, including QoS, Layer 2/3/4 routing, and hardware-based

IPv6.

Following are descriptions of line cards that are available for Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches.

Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber Line Card

Figure 3 shows the WS-X4712-SFP+E.

Figure 3. WS-X4712-SFP+E Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series 12-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (SFP+)