Anatomy Of A Shortage: Cisco Products That Came Up Short

Anatomy Of A Shortage

Cisco solution providers and distributors witnessed an unprecedented situation in Cisco's supply chain during the past year, causing product shortages and lead times for several of Cisco's best known product families to increase to as many as four times normal levels.

Based on conversations with Cisco solution providers, distributors, Cisco analysts, secondary market resellers and other channel sources, here's a look at some of the products and product families that were most severely impacted.

Cisco ASA 5505

The Adaptive Security Appliance 5505 is intended for small business, branch office and enterprise teleworker settings. It offers 150 Mbps of firewall throughput, 10,000 maximum firewall connections, 4,000 maximum firewall connections per second, 85,000 packets per second, 100 Mbps of maximum 3DES/AES VPN throughput, 10 maximum site-to-site and remote access VPN sessions, 25 maximum SSL VPN user sessions and 2 bundled SSL VPN user sessions.

It offers 512 MB of memory and 64 MB minimum system flash. It contains eight integrated ports and two Power over Ethernet ports, and enables as many as three virtual interfaces.

Cisco ASA 5510

The ASA 5510 is intended for the Internet edge. It offers 300 Mbps of firewall throughput, 50,000 maximum firewall connections, 9000 maximum firewall connections per second, 190,000 packets per second, 170 Mbps of maximum 3DES/AES VPN throughput, 250 maximum site-to-site and remote access VPN sessions, 250 maximum SSL VPN user sessions and 2 bundled SSL VPN user sessions.

It offers 1 GB of memory and 64 MB minimum system flash. It contains five 10/100 integrated ports, four 10/100/1000 ports and 4 SFP, and enables as many as 50 virtual interfaces.

Cisco ASA 5520

The ASA 5520 is intended for the Internet edge. It offers 450 Mbps of firewall throughput, 280,000 maximum firewall connections, 12,000 maximum firewall connections per second, 320,000 packets per second, 225 Mbps of maximum 3DES/AES VPN throughput, 750 maximum site-to-site and remote access VPN sessions, 750 maximum SSL VPN user sessions and 2 bundled SSL VPN user sessions.

It offers 1 GB of memory and 64 MB minimum system flash. It contains one 10/100 intetgrated port and four 10/100/1000, and enables as many as 150 virtual interfaces.

Cisco ASA 5540

The ASA 5540 is intended for the Internet edge. It offers 650 Mbps of firewall throughput, 400,000 maximum firewall connections, 25,000 maximum firewall connections per second, 500,000 packets per second, 325 Mbps of maximum 3DES/AES VPN throughput, 5000 maximum site-to-site and remote access VPN sessions, 25 maximum SSL VPN user sessions and 2 bundled SSL VPN user sessions.

It offers 512 MB of memory and 64 MB minimum system flash. It contains eight integrated ports and two Power over Ethernet ports, and enables as many as three virtual interfaces.

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series

Cisco's Nexus 7000 is a family of modular switches that is key to Cisco data center deployments. Its two models, an 18-slot version and a 10-slot version, offer 10-Gigabit Ethernet and run on Cisco NX-OS, which was updated to version 5.0 in May.

Cisco Catalyst 4500/4900 Series

Cisco bills its 4500 Series Switches as "the industry's most widely deployed modular platform" and boasts more than 500,000 chassis deployed worldwide. Among the 4500 E-series' more recent additions are a Supervisor Engine 6L-3, which supports OSPF, EIGRP and BGP routing protocols, and includes centralized 280-Gbps switching capacity with 225 millions of packets per second in throughput.

The 4900 family (pictured) are top-of-rack switches for data center aggregation, and among other features include edge switch auto-provisioning and, in branch office environments, can provide up to 320 Gbps forwarding capacity and support for main routing protocols and IPv6.

Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series

Several Cisco partners reported shortages with various models in Cisco's 6500 switch series. One of the basic models, the 6503-E, includes three slots, offers 950W AC EOC 01/15/06, 950W DC and 1400W AC as power supply options, includes supervisor 32 and supervisor 720 options for supervisor engines.

Cisco CP-7900 IP Phones

Network switches and firewalls were the most commonly affected product families for Cisco, but a few solution providers reported hold-ups in other specific equipment, with several mentioning newer models -- the 7962G was cited -- of Cisco's CP-7900 IP phones. Cisco touts "high-fidelity wideband audio for lifelike conversations" and "high-resolution grayscale display for easy use of Cisco Unified Communications and third-party telephone applications" as among the 79G2Gs key features.