The Cisco Catalyst 4500 series provides scalable, nonblocking Layer 2-4 switching with secure, flexible, nonstop communications, enabling business resilience for enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Metro Ethernet customers deploying business-critical applications. The Catalyst 4500 series has a centralized forwarding architecture that simplifies operations and management and helps enable collaboration and virtualization. With compatibility spanning multiple generations, the Catalyst 4500 E-series provides exceptional investment protection and deployment flexibility to meet the evolving needs of organizations of all sizes. The Catalyst 4500 E-series platform has 10Gbps uplinks and supports Power over Ethernet Plus (PoEP) to help power collaboration devices.

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 series extends control to the network edge with intelligent network services, including sophisticated quality of service (QoS), predictable performance, advanced security, comprehensive management, and integrated resiliency. Scalability of these intelligent network services is made possible with dedicated, specialized resources known as ternary content addressable memory (TCAM). Ample TCAM resources enable "high feature capacity", which provides wire-speed routing/switching performance independent of provisioning of services such as QoS and security. This helps ensure scalability for today's network requirements with ample room for future growth.