12/13/2004 -- Call it an early Christmas gift: Cisco Systems last month announced new products and touted enhancements to its Cisco Catalyst switch portfolio that it says deliver improved security, availability and performance.

New additions include the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 4500 Series supervisor engines, which feature improved security, availability and integrated 10-Gigabit Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as the Catalyst 6500, 3750 and 3560 10/100/1000 Power over Ethernet (PoE) products. Cisco also announced high-availability offerings and a GbE-enabled IP Phone.

Steven Schuchart, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., describes Cisco’s new Catalyst switch offerings as “evolutionary” rather than revolutionary introductions. “Competitors have raised the bar on port density, security and the ability to provide 10-Gigabit Ethernet everywhere,” writes Schuchart. “Taken as a whole, these announcements clearly show Cisco’s commitment to technologies such as IP telephony and the idea that an Ethernet network is the only communications network that businesses need to function.”

According to Schuchart, Cisco’s new Catalyst offerings—while, admittedly, far from revolutionary—will reshape the market in at least one key respect. “The market impact of this announcement will be primarily on competitive sales tactics. Vendors that have been exploiting weaknesses and gaps in Cisco’s product lines will need to compensate and take a new tack,” he says. “Vendors that are currently lagging behind in 10-Gigabit capability will find themselves even further behind the eight ball as customers begin to consider seriously 10-Gigabit Ethernet and prices drop.”

Also market-breaking, Schuchart speculates, are the enhancements Cisco has made to its high-availability modes on the Catalyst 6500 and 4500 switches. “[These] enable its product to be configured in a more reliable and highly available fashion than possible before. The impact on the market is such that Cisco has a tangible advantage when discussing high-availability networks for telephony with the customer, giving it an ‘in’ for both the data and voice networks,” he suggests.

Elsewhere, says Schuchart, the new supervisor module for the Catalyst 6500 supports NSF stateful failover at Layer 3, and the new Supervisor Engine V-10GE for the Catalyst 4500 supports SSO at Layer 2. And the new line cards Cisco introduced for the Catalyst 6500 give that platform highly competitive tri-speed density and port flexibility with copper, XFP and RJ-21 ports, in addition to PoE. Finally, the extension of the Catalyst 3750 and 3560 fixed configuration switch product lines provides the density and PoE options Cisco needed to match existing products from other vendors, Schuchart writes. -Stephen Swoyer