Cisco Products are industry's most widely deployed universal products and service provider and offer exceptional price/performance, wide range of connectivity options, permutation and combination, and numerous features including serviceability and manageability, the SUP engines, blades, processors etc offer increased performance with the new Services Adapters and last but not the least offers increased scalability and flexibility.

SUP Engines: The Sup engines come in various combinations. For example, the SUP engines used for Catalyst 6500 Series switches ensure the latest advanced switching technology with proven Cisco software offers a new shift in scalable, intelligent multilayer switching solutions which can be used in enterprise as well as service provider environments.

Coming to the Sup Engines 2 ? it uses the latest ASIC technology, building upon the Supervisor Engine 1A so as to be able to deliver next-generation features and services. The Sup Engine 2 is a crucial and key element of the new Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF)-based architecture which helps distributed forwarding. Besides this, these Sup Engines also acts as the control module for the Catalyst 6500 series architecture built around the crossbar fabric. These Sup Engines allow connections to both - the existing bus and switch fabrics making it a suitable product for the entire Catalyst 6500 Series. The most important point to note here is that this ensures complete investment protection for customers who hope to transit into the new architecture by allowing them to populate the chassis with classic as well as new fabric-enabled cards. Both these Sup Engines 2 and 1A deliver the most advanced intelligent switching available in the industry.

Processors: Interface Processors provide support for a variety of network interconnects for Cisco 7000 and 7500 series routers. The Cisco 7000 Family Channel Interface Processor (CIP) provides Enterprise System Connection (ESCON) connections to IBM and IBM-compatible mainframes.

Cisco Systems' new channelized digital signal level 3 interface processor for Cisco 7500 and 7000/Route Switch Processor series routers promises to deliver the next level of scalability in wide-area networking. These offer onboard testing and troubleshooting, and also successfully deliver full line rate and fractional DS-1 support across all DS-1 channels. With this feature, the CT3IP is able to offer the highest level of integration and functionality in the industry.

Blades: Coming to Blades, the experts visualise that n the long run, the enterprise data center is going to be all about providing computing resources for an organization. And the best people to provide these solutions are going to be blade server manufacturer who will be using virtualization with networking adding to the system or a data networking manufacturer adding blade servers and virtualization.

The movement toward blade servers in the enterprise data center has been growing steadily for some time. And Cisco is trying to make an entry into the market setting up for a battle with blade server manufacturers for control of the enterprise data center. Cisco is basically not a blade server manufacturer. They are into networking sofwares and services. But they do produce Linux-based blades for their Catalyst 6500 Series switches.