Catalyst 5500 ATM Fabric Integration Module [Cisco Catalyst 5000 Series Switches]

DATA SHEET

The NetFlow Feature Card II (NFFC II) enables advanced features and functionality for the Catalyst® 5000 Family.

Figure 1. Deployable as a Daughter Card for any Supervisor Engine III, the NetFlow Feature Card II Enables Application-Aware Switching

QUALITY OF SERVICE

The NetFlow Feature Card II is part of the CiscoAssure end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) solution. Deployed in a wiring closet, the NFFC II can identify user applications and classify traffic with the appropriate priority level. It enables admission control at the network edge to prevent unauthorized applications from being allowed on the network. The NFFC II can classify user data as high or low priority, based upon physical source port, source/destination Media Access Control (MAC) address, or network- and transport-layer source/destination addresses. With the NFFC II, the Catalyst 5000 Family switches are QoS edge devices that are application aware. This functionality will be available with a future software upgrade released later this year.

MULTILAYER SWITCHING

NFFC technology provides packet-by-packet Layer 3 switching at performance rates of millions of packets per second. A NFFC II populates its Layer 3 and 4 switching cache dynamically by observing and learning the flow of a traditionally routed packet. The NFFC II performs flow classification by parsing each packet (in hardware) up to the transport-layer header. The NFFC II identifies flows by using both network- and transport-layer information and switches packets between subnets using its advanced ASIC switching hardware. The NFFC II switches packets in the same way as a software-based router, except at much higher performance levels. NFFC technology is standards based and is transparent to the end station, requiring no software or hardware changes.

NETWORK MANAGEMENT

With NetFlow data export, the performance management capability of the Catalyst 5000 Family is extended to provide comprehensive monitoring of all intersubnet flows. This complements the embedded mini-RMON capabilities already available on the Catalyst 5000 Family switch. The flow statistics gathered enable several key customer applications and benefits:

• User Monitoring and Profiling-Gain detailed understanding of user utilization of network and application resources. This information can then be used to efficiently plan and allocate resources.

• Application Monitoring and Profiling-Gain a detailed view of application traffic patterns over the network. For example, the network administrator can see the percentage of traffic used by the Web, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Telnet, and other well-known TCP/IP applications.

• Network Monitoring-Enables network monitoring capabilities. RMON, RMON2, and flow-based analysis techniques can be used to provide proactive problem detection, efficient troubleshooting, and rapid problem resolution.

• Network Planning-Provides key information for sophisticated tools such as those from the Cisco Netsys application to optimize strategic network planning.

• Accounting and Billing-Provides metering (for example, flow data, including details such as IP addresses, packet and byte counts, time stamps, application ports) for flexible resource utilization accounting.

MORE ADVANCED SERVICES

The NetFlow Feature Card II offers other advanced, multilayer services geared for the wiring closet, including:

• Protocol Filtering-On a port-by-port basis, the NFFC II can filter broadcast traffic by protocol, resulting in more efficient use of bandwidth for end stations. For example, IP-only workstations will not receive broadcasts from "chatty" protocols such as IPX Service Advertisement Protocol (SAPs), and RIPS. In addition, protocol filtering is automatically set up by system software so that there is no configuration overhead for the network manager.

• IGMP Snooping-User stations request multicast applications by sending IGMP messages. With an NFFC II, Catalyst switches are able to act upon these user-station IGMP messages with a feature called IGMP snooping. By receiving and reading IGMP messages, Catalyst switches become intelligent multicast devices and forward only multicast streams to the appropriate user end stations.

• Efficient Multicast-With a future software upgrade, the NFFC II provides hardware-based duplication of IP multicast packets destined for multiple subnets. This feature offloads the software-based router from duplicating and transmitting multicast packets.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

IEEE Standards

• Ethernet: IEEE 802.3, 10BaseT, and 10BaseFL

• Fast Ethernet: IEEE 802.3u, 100BaseTX, 100BaseFX

• Gigabit Ethernet: IEEE 802.3z, 1000Base SX, LX

Protocol Support

• NetFlow feature card-IP, RSM-IP, IPX, AT, DECnet, VINES, Systems Network Architecture (SNA), Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM), Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP)

Physical Specifications

• Daughter Card for Catalyst 5000 Supervisor Engine

• Dimensions (H x W x D): .093 x 8.2 x 14.2 in. (2.36 x 208.3 x 360.68 cm)

Environmental Conditions

• Operating temperature: 32 to 104 F (0 to 40 C)

• Storage temperature: -40 to 167 F (-40 to 75 C)

• Relative humidity: 10% to 90%, noncondensing

Hierarchical Navigation

Cisco Catalyst 5000 Series Switches

Catalyst 5500 ATM Fabric Integration Module

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