CISCO WS-G5483=

The Catalyst 8500 series Multiservice Switch Routers integrate multiservice ATM switching with wire-speed Layer 3 switching for Gigabit Ethernet into a single platform that also supports advanced Cisco IOS services. The Catalyst 8500 family delivers campus and metropolitan network solutions with scalable performance, lower cost of ownership, and the features needed by intranet-based applications to deliver increased business productivity.

Historically, enterprise network managers faced a choice of several different technologies when building or upgrading campus network backbones. Today, the choice is between Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet on one hand, which provides high performance, low cost, and familiarity (relative to Ethernet), and ATM on the other hand, with its high performance, advanced QoS capabilities, support for multiservice voice/data integration and metro/wide area extendability. The network designer must also think about the role of routing in the backbone, which is required for network scalability. The Catalyst 8500 family takes the risk out of this choice by supporting Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, and wire-speed multiprotocol routing in a single platform. This combination enables network designers to combine multiple technologies in a single network, using each to its best advantage.