SFP+ DAC Cables for Cisco Catalyst 4500-X Series Switch

Driven by the cloud computing and improvement of technology, 21st century witnesses a major shift from traditional enterprise data centers to much larger cloud data centers. These large data centers require a much higher-performance network, and need to interconnect many thousands of servers with predictable bandwidth and low-latency. Cisco 10G Catalyst 4500-X series switch is the highest throughput 10G Ethernet switch in the industry. It provides the high scalability, simplified network virtualization, application monitoring, and integrated network services for space-constrained environments in campus networks which meets the business growth objectives with unprecedented scalability. Some detailed information about Cisco 4500-X series switch and its optical solutions will be introduced to you, allowing you to easily deploy it in your network.

Cisco 4500-X Series Switch

The Cisco Catalyst 4500-X Series provides scalable, fixed-campus aggregation solutions in space-constrained environments. As you can see from the picture below, Cisco 4500-X Series Switch is available in three versions—32-port, 16-port, and 8-port. An additional 8 ports of 1000BASE-X (SFP) or 10GBASE-X (SFP+) are also available in a removable Ethernet uplink module that mounts in a bay on the front of the switch chassis, and the uplink module is hot swappable. Both 32-port and 16-port versions can be configured with optional network modules and maintain similar features and scalability.

One unique feature of this switch is that the SFP+ interface on this switch supports both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet ports, which allows users to use their investment in Gigabit Ethernet SFP and upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet without having to do a comprehensive upgrade of the existing deployment.

Besides for providing the high bandwidth and performance, the Cisco Catalyst 4500-X series also offers the following primary innovations to address these requirements and to provide room for future growth:

• Performance and Scalability: Delivers up to 800 Gbps of switching capacity with up to 250 Mpps of throughput, will be able to scale to 1.6-Tbps capacity with VSS. Future-proof investment with modular uplink and autodetect 10 Gigabit Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet uplinks.
• High Availability: Delivers the network availability demanded by business-critical enterprise applications through comprehensive network resiliency capabilities, including VSS, in addition to traditional control plane protocols such as First-Hop Resiliency Protocol (FHRP), Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). Furthermore, device resiliency features such as redundant hot-swappable fans, power supplies, and AC to DC failover and vice versa remove single points of failure in the network.
• Security: Support for Cisco TrustSec®* security, providing Network Device Admission Control (NDAC) to authenticate connecting switch, line-rate Media Access Control Security (MACsec)* data link-layer encryption, and role-based access-control list (ACL) and policy enforcement. Storm control and robust control plane policing (CoPP) to address denial of service (DoS) attacks and Internet worms.
• Network Virtualization: Support for Layer 3 segmentation using VRF and EVN.
• Simplified Operations: Support for Smart Install Director, providing a single point of management enabling zero-touch deployment for new switches and stacks in in campus and branch networks

Optical Solutions for Cisco 4500-X Series Switch

As noted before, the network interface ports on the Cisco 4500-X switch can be connected with 1G and 10G Ethernet optics. Take SFP+ cables as an example, the following chart presents the compatible SFP+ cables that can be used in Cisco 4500-X Series Switch.

These cables are called 10G direct-attach copper (DAC) cables. SFP+ DAC cables from Cisco are developed as a cost-effective alternative for very short links in high-speed interconnect application within racks and across adjacent racks. This SFP+ copper cable assembly uses twinax shielded cable with robust die cast connector interfaces for enhanced support of high frequency data rates, which means signals travel over parallel pairs of conductors. 10G SFP+ twinax copper cables contains 2 pairs—one for transmit (Tx) and one for receive (Rx) and each shielded pair is surrounded by an overall shield. Cisco passive twinax cables are offered in different lengths of 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 and 5 meters, such as SFP-H10GB-CU1M, SFP-H10GB-CU3M and SFP-H10GB-CU5M.

SFP-H10GB-CU3M is a Cisco 10GBase-CU SFP+ to SFP+ direct attach cable that operates over passive copper with a maximum reach of 3m. It has been programmed, uniquely serialized, and data-traffic and application tested to ensure 100% compliant and functional. 10G SFP+ DAC cables from 

Summary

The world's thirst for data is growing, and little seems to quench it. If your business is already starting to feel the pinch for data bottlenecks, an upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches will put you back in the fast lane. The Cisco 4500-X Series Switch is always here to help you out, and to save budget, you should turn to a reliable OEM vendor for your 10G fiber optics. FS.COM offers a large selection of the compatible Cisco SFP+ transceivers and DAC cables. For example, SFP-10G-SR, SFP-10G-LRM, SFP-H10GB-CU1M, SFP-H10GB-CU3M, etc are all provided with very low price and high quality.