The card has been designed to be highly flexible to accommodate the new features required by service providers. Supported by the Cisco 12000 Series distributed system architecture, the 4-port Gigabit Ethernet line card provides advanced features, and it maintains performance when the features are enabled as a result of the dedicated Layer 3 forwarding application-specific-integrated-circuit (ASIC) and advanced-memory components. The card's features include industry-leading QoS, which is ideal for customer service-level agreements (SLAs), extended access control lists (ACLs) to address security risks, rate limiting to ensure that all customers are served according to the SLAs, a comprehensive set of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) features for high-level services to customers, and Ethernet features such as VLANs, source and destination Media Access Control (MAC) accounting, and jumbo frames.
