Table of Contents

Product Overview
Key Features and Benefits

Integrated Layer 3 and SLB Switching
High Performance — SLB at Millions of Packets per Second
Industry Leading SLB Features

Dynamic Feedback Protocol
SLB Stateless & Stateful Redundancy
HTTP Probes

Fast EtherChannel and Gigabit EtherChannel Technologies
Quality of Service
Comprehensive SLB Network Management of CiscoWorks2000 and Content Flow Manager

Specifications
Ordering Information

Additional Catalyst 4000 Products and Part Numbers

New Product: Catalyst 4840G — Server Load Balancing and Layer 3 Switch

Product Overview

The Catalyst 4840G Switch is a compact, high-performance, Server Load-Balancing (SLB) switch featuring wire-speed load balancing between Web servers. The Catalyst 4840G is a fixed configuration SLB switch with 40 RJ-45 10/100 ports and 2 Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports utilizing modular GBIC interfaces. Packing an incredible 9 Million packets per second of system throughput in a compact two rack units (RU), this new catalyst switch provides the high performance that is required for enterprise E-commerce solutions or Internet Service Provider (ISP) solutions such as web hosting or content delivery.

The Catalyst 4840G handles the heaviest traffic loads and enables web sites and server farms to scale to their full potential. The Catalyst 4840G provides a compact solution for designs that do not require the high port densities offered by the Catalyst 6000 family of switches.

Key Features and Benefits

Integrated Layer 3 and SLB Switching

The Catalyst 4840G SLB switch is capable of switching traffic simultaneously through all ports at wire speed. The architecture consists of a 22-Gbps non-blocking switch fabric, multiple high-performance Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processors for SLB and routing intelligence, and dedicated per-port ASICs for wire-speed performance. While supporting a rich set of SLB algorithms and features with all the common Layer 3 routing protocols, the Catalyst 4840 also supports both dispatch and directed SLB modes at wire-speed. These modes allow servers to be L-2 directly connected or located behind additional L-3 hops, providing flexibility in network topologies. The Catalyst 4840G is a truly flexible Web-hosting switch.

Dedicated 40 ports of 10/100-Mbps Ethernet and two ports of 1000BaseX Gigabit Ethernet with gigabit interface converter (GBIC) support for interface flexibility. All ports provide server load balancing and IP Layer 3 switching capability

Multi-processor architecture- Cisco IOS software provides rich SLB algorithms and services as well as L-3 switching support, hardware application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for switching

High Performance — SLB at Millions of Packets per Second

The Catalyst 4840G provides a complete SLB solution without sacrificing any of the services that are required to build a scalable network. The Catalyst 4840G is a feature-rich switch with full Cisco IOS implementation that allows network managers to continue to administer and manage their networks as they do today while scaling their backbone bandwidths to gigabit speeds. The Catalyst 4840G supports all the routing protocols that are used today in Web sites today as well as the major routing protocols. These protocols include:

SLB features

• Least Connections

• Weighted Least Connections

• Round Robin

• Weighted Round Robin

Layer-3 Switching Features

• Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)

• Enhanced IGRP (EIGRP)

• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)

• Routing Information Protocol (RIP) Versions 1 and 2

• Static routes

• Route redistribution

In addition to these routing protocols, the Catalyst 2948G-L3 supports all the additional protocols necessary to build scalable, reliable networks, including:

• Network Time Protocol (NTP)

• Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) 1 and 2

• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Relay

• Cisco Group Management Protocol (CGMP)

• Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)

• Gateway Discovery Protocol (GDP)

• ICMP Router Discovery Protocol (IRDP)

• Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) Relay

Industry Leading SLB Features

The Catalyst 4840G is a fixed configuration SLB switch that is based on industry-standard Cisco IOS software, with all the features of this time-proven software. Uptime is critical to enterprises and ISP web-hosting sites, and the Catalyst 4840G has some crucial features with respect to uptime. Among these features are the following:

Dynamic Feedback Protocol

The Dynamic Feedback allows servers to provide intelligent feedback about application health, availability, and load to SLB devices. It ensures that SLB devices send traffic to the correct server and do not route traffic to over-utilized applications or servers. DFP is the first protocol to allow servers to provide feedback and input into the SLB load-balancing decision.

SLB Stateless & Stateful Redundancy

SLB Stateless and Stateful Redundancy schemes are built upon an extension of HSRP that provides services for SLB. In Stateless mode, the switches communicate only via HSRP hellmessages. In Stateful mode, the switches communicate via HSRP hellmessages and communicate status information. A secondary switch would be able to take over operation from a failed switch and rebuild the connection database. Redundant switches are not distance limited. Since the switches can have redundant routes, link redundancy is also available. The Catalyst 4840G supports an industrial strength highly available redundant designs.

HTTP Probes

Simple polling of application URLs is adequate in many situations to verify server availability. The Catalyst 4840G provides this capability in a flexible manner via switch-based HTTP probes. The HTTP probe is user defined and can be either a HTTP Get or Post sent at a user specified interval. The switch manages the response and takes appropriate action to ensure maximum uptime for mission critical applications and servers.

For more complete management of SLB, both DFP and HTTP probes can be used. DFP can be used to tune the SLB decision making process, and HTTP probes can verify server health and content accuracy.

Fast EtherChannel and Gigabit EtherChannel Technologies

The Catalyst 4840G supports both Fast EtherChannel and Gigabit EtherChannel technologies, allowing network managers to group up to four of the 10/100 ports into a channel and group the two Gigabit Ethernets into an uplink channel.

Quality of Service

The Catalyst 4840G incorporates a centralized non- blocking 22-Gb shared-memory switching fabric. The rich QoS capabilities of the switching fabric enable network managers to protect mission-critical applications by supporting delay-sensitive traffic while managing bandwidth in the campus backbone. The switching fabric supports differentiated delay priorities using a WRR scheduler for delay-sensitive applications, and differentiated loss priorities for managing congestion and traffic policing and shaping. The fast packet memory embedded in the switching fabric is allocated dynamically on a per-queue (flow) basis. This dynamic allocation used in conjunction with user-defined queue thresholds and configurable queue scheduling weights ensures that time- sensitive traffic is handled properly with no packet loss. These thresholds and queuing weights can be dynamically adjusted with CiscoAssure Policy Networking, allowing an end-to-end QoS solution.

Comprehensive SLB Network Management of CiscoWorks2000 and Content Flow Manager

The Catalyst 4840G is easily managed by the powerful CiscoWorks2000 network management products. The Essentials product suite leverages the power of intranets with browser-based access anywhere within the network. Network managers can walk up to any browser console, simply identify who they are via the access control interface, and immediately begin checking on the uptime of each device, the active software versions that are running the Catalyst 4840G and print a year 2000-compliant report. For drill-down, real-time device status information, the network operations staff can launch the award-winning CiscoView application from their fault-management station and check on the health of the power supplies, CPU, and the operational status of each port at a glance.

Monitoring server load-balancing networks is crucial in delivering mission-critical applications and services. Content Flow Monitor is a complete real-time, performance monitoring solution for Cisco server load-balancing networks. It has feature rich performance reporting capabilities to satisfy operational monitoring and troubleshooting needs. Content Flow Monitor 1.1 is an essential tool tenable service providers and large enterprises to offer value added services by automatically extracting and exporting critical configuration and performance statistics.

Specifications

For information on software options for the Catalyst 4000 Family, see Ordering Information section below:

Ordering Information

Additional Catalyst 4000 Products and Part Numbers

See http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/ca4000.htm#order

Posted: Wed Sep 27 05:15:15 PDT 2000
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