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Catalyst 4500 E-Series Switches Installation Guide
OL-13972-01
Chapter 1 Product Overview
System Architecture
In a Catalyst 4500 E-series chassis with the Supervisor 6-E, there is no performance degradation when
both Classic and E-series line cards are mixed within the chassis. The Classic switching modules will
continue to operate at 6 gigabits per slot and the E-series switching modules will operate at 24 gigabits
per slot.
Supervisor Redundancy
The Cisco Catalyst 4507R-E and Catalyst 4510R-E switches support 1+1 supervisor-engine redundancy
for integrated resiliency. Redundant supervisor engines help minimize network downtime. With the
support of stateful switchover (SSO), the secondary supervisor engine serves as a backup to immediately
take over after a primary supervisor failure. During the switchover, Layer 2 links are maintained
transparently without the need to renegotiate sessions. As a result, business-critical applications such as
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls are not dropped. The Nonstop Forwarding (NSF) Aware feature in Cisco IOS
software is also supported, providing the ability to interface with NSF-capable devices and to continue
forwarding packets as routing information is updated upon a supervisor-engine switchover.
