Maximize Network Availability
As your business increases deployment of applications over a unified IP network, network resiliency becomes critical to your success. You can no longer endure unplanned or planned network outages that negatively affect your business.
To help you maximize network availability and virtually eliminate planned outages, Cisco is including full image in-service software upgrade (ISSU) capabilities on the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series. Full image ISSU allows you to upgrade the complete IOS software image without having to take the switch or network out of service.
With ISSU and existing innovative high-availability features, the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series delivers a "nonstop" Ethernet switching platform to meet the most demanding high-availability requirements for enterprise, mid-market and Service provider networks.
Learn about software upgrade features on the Cisco Catalyst 6500.
Release date: September 12, 2006: Cisco IOS software release 12.2(31)SGA
Continuous Innovations Maximize Total System Availability
With the addition of ISSU, the Cisco Catalyst 4500 offers the most comprehensive high-availability feature set in the industry. These features ensure that the Catalyst 4500 Series delivers the highest total system availability for deploying business-critical and real-time applications over a converged IP network.
Total system availability factors in both planned and unplanned outages. Several features in the Cisco Catalyst 4500 help safeguard against unplanned outages (see diagram below). With the addition of full image ISSU, the Cisco Catalyst 4500 virtually eliminates planned maintenance outages for software upgrades, significantly increasing total system availability.
- Full image ISSU allows customers to upgrade the full IOS software image without having to take the switch or network out of service.
- Nonstop forwarding with stateful switchover (NSF/SSO) ensures continuous packet forwarding in a Layer 2 or 3 environment.
- High feature capacity enables multiple concurrent services in hardware, such as QoS, multicast, and security at wire speed without affecting switching or routing performance.
- • Independent hardware TCAM resources process routing and switching separately from services such as QoS and security, ensuring service enablement does not affect critical routing and switching services.
- Control plane policing (CoPP) controls the traffic to the supervisor CPU ensuring stability, availability, and predictable network performance.
- Physical hardware resiliency and detection
- • Redundant supervisor engines: Dual supervisors provide a seamless failover capability in case of supervisor failure.
- • Redundant power supplies: 1+1 redundant power supplies allow for power circuit redundancy, mitigating the most common type of power failure.
- • Hot-swappable fan trays with redundant fans: Fan failure does not take down a switch or require a lengthy network outage to replace the fan or the entire switch.
- • Hot-swappable line cards: Cards can be added or replaced without disrupting data flow in the switch.
- • Generic On-Line Diagnostics (GOLD) proactively checks and detects the health of the switch during startup and runtime operations, helping customers detect and fix potential problems before they disrupt the network.
