Catalyst

Is your data network ready for VoIP?

Hi folks! One of the greatest things about today’s network is that it seems to be able to handle anything. It doesn’t seem to matter what you want to do on your network, there is always a technology around the corner that can make it happen for you.

Well one of the most common things happening today is the conversion of data networks to voice and data networks. With the coming of VoIP, network engineers have been put under an increasing burden to support the world of the telephone when historically data and voice have been two separate entities.

There are a lot of people that erroneously think that VoIP is all about the phones and the PBX, but in reality if you don’t have a data network that can handle the traffic, none of that is really going to matter. Some of things network administrators find out in the end is that a switch isn’t always just a switch. What I mean by this is that administrators have been forced to cut and slash budgets and buy cheaper equipment only to find out that their switch is sub-par and cannot support a voice network. They are then faced with redoing their entire data network infrastructure which makes the cost of going to VoIP prohibitively expensive.

If administrators really look at what is offered to them when they buy network equipment such as switches, they can then plan for future VoIP deployments so when the time comes their data network will be ready. Things such as QOS and POE are two items that are not paid heed to when buying switches if VoIP isn’t in the equation, but then you find out you need it when the company starts going in the VoIP direction.

What I’m trying to say here is that in the future, almost all of us will be using VoIP, so you might as well start planning for getting your data networks ready now.

-RP

Aggregating links on Cisco switches

Hello again folks! So you’ve just recently got your purchase approved for a brand new set of switches and you want to find a way to increase your throughput. What do you do? You aggregate links of course!

Aggregating links is a common thing done on high end switches such as Cisco or HP switches to name a few. The idea behind it is to take two or more ports and bind them together to create a single virtual port that connects to another switch. Then you can take your traffic and shuttle it over this link.

In Cisco land this is called Etherchannel. When you create an Etherchannel, it is treated like an interface. People will commonly create Etherchannels and then trunk their vlans across this link. This allows for quite a bit of bandwidth, especially on gigabit switches. This doesn’t double your bandwidth but it does increase it by a fair bit.

You can read more about etherchannel here.

-RP

New offerings in the switch world from Cisco

Hi folks! I have some great news from the Cisco front. Our friends at Cisco have decided to release a new version of their 2960 switches called “LAN Lite”! This is a new version of the Catalyst switch with slightly less features to bring the price point down for people who don’t need everything that the full 2960 normally provides.

This series of switch is aimed at the SMB market that needs POE switching for voice and data for unified communications. More and more we are seeing companies requiring enterprise level equipment to facilitate unified communications in their SMB networks. This isn’t easy for these SMB companies because enterprise level equipment can get quite expensive. Cisco has seen this need and is now offering the necessary equipment to fulfill these needs at a lower price by offering “LAN Lite”.

You can read more about it and compare the different versions here at Cisco’s web site. You can also go here to this other link at Cisco’s web site to read more about their offer.

-RP