Product Overview

This chapter describes the Catalyst 4912G switch. For detailed descriptions of system features and components, see "Switch Description."

This chapter contains these sections:

The Catalyst 4912G (see Figure 1-1) Ethernet switch is designed for high-performance, high-density wiring closet applications. The Catalyst 4912G switch can interface to networking equipment with 1000BaseX Gigabit Ethernet speed. Gigabit Ethernet is used primarily for backbone interconnection of high-performance switches and routers.

Figure 1-1: Catalyst 4912G Switch

The Catalyst 4912G switch has a 12-Gbps, nonblocking, full-duplex, switching fabric providing 24 Gbps of bandwidth for high-speed applications.

The Catalyst 4912G chassis has 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports. These ports use modular Gigabit Interface Converters (GBICs). A GBIC is a hot-swappable input/output device that plugs into the Gigabit port, linking the port with the fiber-optic network. For a detailed description of Gigabit ports, see the "Gigabit Port Information" section. The following GBIC media types are supported on the Catalyst 4912G switch:

Shortwave 1000BaseSX (WS-G5484)
Longwave 1000BaseLX/LH (WS-G5486)

An external power supply is available to provide fault tolerance protection for the switch. See the "Connecting Power to the Catalyst 4912G" section.

Catalyst 4912G Features

The following is an overview of Catalyst 4912G features:

12 1000BaseX Gigabit Ethernet ports
Optional redundant, external power supply
Layer 2 forwarding with an aggregate forwarding rate of greater than 17.8 million packets per second
24-Gbps bandwidth
Support for 16,000 Media Access Control (MAC) addresses per system
Support for 1,024 virtual local area networks (VLANs) with these features:
- IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging on all ports
- Support for VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP)
Support for port aggregation using Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) for Gigabit EtherChannel
Catalyst 5000 series management software features including:
- Command-line Interface (CLI) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interfaces consistent with the Catalyst 5000 series switches
- Compatible development of new features with the Catalyst 5000 series switches
- Support for out-of-band management over serial lines through a terminal attached to the console interface
- Support for 10BaseT out-of-band management and in-band management through any switch port via SNMP, Telnet client, and Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)
- Remote Monitoring (RMON) with RMON-1
- Support for standard Layer 2 features: 802.1D Spanning Tree, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), VTP version 2 with pruning extensions, and Cisco Group Management Protocol (CGMP) client
Embedded management features including:
- Full SNMP instrumentation including entity-Management Information Base (MIB), all relevant standard MIBs, and all relevant Cisco MIBs
- Support for the first four RMON groups (Ethernet Statistics, Alarms, Events, and History) on a per port basis without the need for an optional RMON processing module
- Support for redirecting traffic from any port to a "sniff"port. Any switching port can be designated as a sniff port
- Performance management information

Table of Contents