With an eye toward helping corporate customers add faster and more intelligent pipes to their LANs, Cisco last week added a new version of its stackable aggregation switch and a new Gigabit Ethernet box for desktop links.
With an eye toward helping corporate customers add faster and more intelligent pipes to their LANs, Cisco last week added a new version of its stackable aggregation switch and a new Gigabit Ethernet box for desktop links.
The Catalyst 3750G-12S includes 12 fiber-based Gigabit ports and can be linked with up to eight other 3750 series switches with Cisco’s StackWise technology, creating a high-speed ring of switches. The 24-port Catalyst 2790G-24T is targeted as a LAN edge switch, with 10/100/1000M bit/sec capabilities and quality of service on all ports.
StackWise technology, announced in April along with the Catalyst 3750 series, lets stackable Gigabit Ethernet switches be linked in a 32G bit/sec ring, which provides fast failover and high-speed uplinks to wiring closet switches, Cisco says. The Catalyst 3750G-12S could be used as an aggregation layer switch, connecting wiring closet boxes to a LAN core. The switch also comes with Cisco’s Cluster Management Suite software, which can be used to configure, manage and monitor StackWise clusters.
Catalyst 3750 switches with StackWise are being deployed at Portland State University in Oregon, where 20 of the stackable boxes will serve as the school’s aggregation and backbone layers. The ability to add more switches as needed was the reason the school chose the stackable Cisco technology instead of a chassis-based core product, says Jon Snyder, a network engineer at the university. He adds that support costs on the individual 3750s will be much less than if he were to deploy Catalyst 6500 chassis to do the same job.
“Of course, you can do more with a [Catalyst 6500], but for our purposes, the [Catalyst] 3750s were the best choice,” he says.
The Catalyst 2790G-24T is aimed at wiring closets in companies looking into Gigabit to the desktop. With the ability to provide three speeds of Ethernet, the switch could be deployed to support 10/100M bit/sec users now, and eventually Gigabit Ethernet desktop users. The box also comes with four slots for adding Gigabit uplink insert modules, which can be fiber- or copper-based.
Cisco’s Catalyst 3750 line competes with 3Com’s Switch 4000 series of fixed-configuration Gigabit Ethernet switches and Nortel’s BayStack 5000 all-Gigabit boxes. 3Com has its Extendable Resilient Network architecture, which connects Switch 4000s with multigigabit links and provides failover of Layer 3 routing tables. Nortel’s Flexible Advanced Stacking Technology is similar technology that can connect BayStack 5000s with up to 20G bit/sec of total bandwidth.
The Catalyst 3750G-12S costs $8,000. The Catalyst 2970G-24TS will be available at the end of this month for $5,500.
