<P> The Catalyst 5000 Family which includes the Catalyst 5000 Series and Catalyst 5500 Series of switches provides the scalability flexibility and redundancy required for building large switched intranets. The media-independent architecture supports all LAN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching technologies through a wide range of Ethernet Fast Ethernet Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) ATM Token Ring and Gigabit Ethernet switch modules. The Catalyst 5000 Family of switches delivers an architecture that supports gigabit switching options scaling performance to more than 50 Gbps and tens of millions of packets per second (pps). </P>