Cisco‘s latest wave of LAN switching announcements further blurs the demarcation between edge and backbone corporate networks.
Cisco last week unleashed more than 20 Catalyst products to push more core features, such as 10G Ethernet uplinks and sophisticated software services, into wiring closets. Core-like security and high availability are also now spreading to the edge.
Analysts liken the trend to the broadening intelligence of service provider networks.
“If you look at the way carrier networks are designed where the core itself is relatively dumb and all of the intelligence is distributed at the edge, it’s just a much more efficient way of doing it,” says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at The Yankee Group. “If you are talking about user policies and trying to do things on an individual port or user basis, you want to push that functionality out as far as you can.”
One driver is the availability of Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop. PCs with integrated 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet jacks are now more prevalent than those without. Cisco’s announcements included an IP phone with a Gigabit Ethernet link.
Another driver is that prices for 10G bit/sec Ethernet products continue to decline, although not as much as some would like.
“The number of standard Gigabit [desktop] interfaces presents a challenge for those of us providing the infrastructure,” says George Kohrman, assistant director of network infrastructure at Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo. “Part of the problem is the expense of 10G is dropping but is still kind of expensive. None of the vendors really have a good inexpensive solution.”
Among the key 10G products Cisco unveiled last week were Supervisor Engines with integrated 10G Ethernet interfaces and uplinks for the Catalyst 6500 and 4500 switches. The engines let the switches aggregate multiple 1G bit/sec Ethernet desktop links and drop them down to the core Cisco switch. The new engines also introduce 10G support over multimode fiber, which is a more commonly deployed fiber plant in corporations than single-mode. Multimode was used in older FDDI and Gigabit Ethernet networks.
The Supervisor Engine 32 for the edge 6500 is based on Cisco’s Supervisor Engine 720 for the core 6500. It includes security features, such as denial-of-service mitigation, usually reserved for the core.
“You never know where you’re going to get hit from,” says Cisco customer Dean Coyle, network analyst at Central DuPage Health in Winfield, Ill.
The Supervisor Engine 32 includes a key element of Cisco’s wireless LAN offerings that could presage a drop in the entry price of a Cisco WLAN network.
Cisco’s WLAN offerings now require a Catalyst 6500 with the Supervisor 720 and a WLAN switching module (WLSM), notes Joel Conover, an analyst at Current Analysis.
“Together this stuff makes about a $50,000 package, which is the cost to get into Cisco wireless before you start even buying” access points, Conover says.
He says the Supervisor Engine 32 embeds code that’s required for use with the WLSM. Cisco could subsequently add code to the WLSM to support the Supervisor Engine 32, which would drop the entry point into Cisco WLANs by $10,000, Conover says.
“Most of the other [WLAN] solutions in the market top out at $8,000,” he says.
With the Supervisor Engine 32, Cisco is the first among its high-end peers – 3Com, Alcatel, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks and HP – to build 10G ports into a switch fabric module, observers note. They have approached this core-to-closet architecture by pushing fixed-configuration LAN switches with 10G uplinks at aggressive prices.
For the 4500, Cisco rolled out the Layer 2/3/4 Supervisor Engine V-10GE, which offers dual wire-speed 10G Ethernet ports or four Gigabit Ethernet ports. This configuration is designed to accommodate users migrating from 1G to 10G.
Other key offerings were switches that feature standard and non-standard Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities, which juice up VoIP and WLANs. PoE is now found in Cisco’s 6500, 3750 and 3560 switches for the edge, and a new 96-port RJ-21 LAN access module for the 6500.
Cisco has increased the bandwidth on its Catalyst 3750 and 3560 PoE-enabled switches to 10/100/1000M bit/sec (10/100/1000 PoE was previously available only on the Catalyst 6500). Cisco also has added its Time Domain Reflectonomy technology – for detecting faults in network cables – into its 10/100/ 1000M bit/sec PoE modules for the Catalyst 6500.
“[Standards-based PoE] is critical for IP telephony and access point deployments,” says Matthew Valenzisi, a network engineer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, which is doing both. “We’re trying to install one hot spot per month.”
Competing PoE switches are offered by Dell, Enterasys, Foundry, HP and Nortel. Cisco is the only one offering an RJ-21 product that supports PoE.
The new Catalyst 6500 blade lets network technicians provide IEEE 802.3af-compliant power to 96 end-user Ethernet ports by connecting to a network patch panel via six telco connector cables (containing 16 Ethernet connections wrapped together). These cables plug into a patch panel that terminates the links across 96 RJ-45 ports.
But power is only on when applications are available. To boost the uptime of these enhanced switches, Cisco is adding IOS software with Layer 2 non-stop forwarding and stateful switchover (SSO) to the Catalyst 4500. This follows the release in August of Layer 2 and 3 SSO and a non-stop forwarding IOS version for the Catalyst 6500.
Without SSO, “VoIP calls lose or drop their connection,” says Central DuPage’s Coyle. “Dropped connections are your biggest enemy.”
Despite the breadth of Cisco’s LAN barrage, users still want more.
“I really wish Cisco would put a few more things in [the 4500], like an IDS blade,” says Bill Hamilton, director of enterprise architecture at Maritz, a Missouri application service provider.
All products are available now, with the exception of Supervisor 32 with the dual 10G Ethernet links. That is slated to be available in February 2005.
Catalyst 6500 products range from $5,000 to $20,000. The Supervisor Engine V-10GE costs $20,000. Prices for the 3750 and 3560 switches range from $4,800 to $15,500. The Gigabit Ethernet phone – called the 7971G-GE – costs $845.
Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth contributed to this story.
