Cisco is announcing the new Cisco® Catalyst® 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E optimized for high-performance enterprise access. The supervisor engine extends the Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series facilitating performance, enabling services, and protecting investments for enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) deploying business-critical applications. The competitive pricing on the supervisor engine makes it an ideal entry-point offering.

Product Overview
The Supervisor Engine 6L-E provides a fourfold increase in per-slot switching capacity from previous-generation basic Layer 3 Cisco Catalyst 4500 supervisor engines at 24 Gbps per slot. Primary Supervisor Engine 6L-E performance features include:
- Centralized 280-Gbps switching capacity with 225 mpps of throughput;
- IPv6 support in hardware, providing wire-rate forwarding for IPv6 networks;
- Dynamic hardware forwarding-table allocations for easy IPv4-to-IPv6 migration;
- Advanced quality of service (QoS) support with eight queues per port, dynamic queue sizing, and hierarchical policing;
- Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks (X2 optics).

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series is optimized for collaboration. It offers superior services essential for business-critical real-time applications and is designed for nonstop communications with Nonstop Forwarding, Stateful Switchover (NSF/SSO), and In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU). The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series is easy to manage with features such as Smartports, EEM, and SMART Call Home. These features combined with standard Cisco Catalyst 4500 features such as QoS, multicast, IPv6, and security features including Layer 2 security, IEEE 802.1X, and control plane policing (CoPP), make it an ideal platform for enterprise access.
The Supervisor Engine 6L-E enables optimum enterprise operations. The supervisor engine shows a 70 percent decline in power consumed/Gbps when compared with the WS-X4013+. The supervisor engine also allows the Cisco Catalyst 4500 chassis to minimize power usage by automatically sensing unused slots and turning off power to the ASICs on unused slots. When combined with Cisco Catalyst 4500 line cards, the system supports Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Cisco enhanced PoE. It is also ready to support the upcoming IEEE 802.3at (PoEP) standard and inline power upto 30W/port.
The Supervisor Engine 6L-E offers flexibility and investment protection. It supports Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series line cards in addition to all currently shipping classic Cisco IOS® Software supervisor engines and classic line cards dating back to 1999. Classic and E-Series line cards can be mixed and matched with no performance degradation. Twin Gigabit Ethernet converter modules offer flexibility for up to 4 Gigabit Ethernet Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) uplinks in the X2 optic slots, allowing a phased migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The Supervisor Engine 6L-E works with the 7-slot, 6-slot, and 3-slot E-series chassis and all shipping Cisco Catalyst 4500 power supplies.