Cisco continues to develop and evolve the award-winning Catalyst 5500 Series with the introduction of a new chassis: the Catalyst 5509. The new Catalyst 5509 protects customers' Catalyst 5000 Family investments by seamlessly integrating all existing Catalyst 5000 Series interface modules and features into a new, high-performance chassis. The Catalyst 5509 provides dedicated switching for up to 384 users, making this chassis an ideal platform for wiring closet solutions. The Catalyst 5509 also supports high-density Gigabit Ethernet for switched intranet backbones and data centers that require multimillion-pps forwarding rates.For Gigabit Ethernet backbone applications, the Catalyst 5509 supports up to 38 ports of Gigabit Ethernet, the highest port density available today for the Catalyst 5500 Series. This capability can be combined with Cisco Gigabit EtherChannel technology. Gigabit EtherChannel technology enables multiple Gigabit Ethernet links to be treated as one logical link, for up to 8 Gbps (full duplex) of device-to-device throughput. Used in such a configuration, the Catalyst 5509 creates an industry-leading Gigabit Ethernet backbone solution to meet the requirements of today's demanding and fast-growing enterprise intranets. As a low-cost wiring closet solution, the Catalyst 5509 supports high-density, dedicated Token Ring or 10/100/1000 Ethernet switching. The Catalyst 5509 can support up to 384 dedicated switch ports with only a 15A circuit requirement, allowing for easy installation in most wiring closet environments. The Catalyst 5509 also supports all advanced Cisco features for the wiring closet, such as automatic protocol broadcast filtering to conserve valuable bandwidth, intelligent multicast forwarding to handle multimedia traffic, and load balancing over redundant links. With its support for hot-swappable modules, power supplies, and fans, the Catalyst 5509 chassis delivers high availability for production networks. Dual-redundant switching engines, power supplies, and a passive backplane design ensure full system redundancy for mission-critical environments. Supervisor Engine II or higher can be used in a Catalyst 5509. The Catalyst 5509 chassis fits into a standard 19-inch rack, and all system components are accessible from the same side of the chassis. Only one power supply is required to run a fully configured system.