Cisco has released their 2960 and 3560 switches in a “C” version. This is their new compact line of switches. These switches are fanless and support POE pass-through.  Cisco describes these switches as switches you would place outside the closet in hard to reach places where you might not even have a power supply available to you. The POE pass-through would power the switch and any POE devices connected to them as long as they are hooked up off of a switch with POE+.

You can read more about the Cisco Catalyst C series here.

-RP

Well you use fiber of course! The question is what type of fiber? There are so many variants to choose from. Cisco has a nice guide on what to choose based on what distance you need to go.

You can reference this guide here. Then all you have to do is buy the right GBICS for your switches and have a reputable company run your fiber for you and that’s all there is to it.

-RP

Well the new series supports a feature called FlexStack! You can stack 2960 switches like you do with the higher end switches. It’s not the same as StackWise technology but it is still stackable. Other things included are, USB, POE +, and 10 GigE!

You can read more about the new switch series here.

-RP

So what are the new features? Well the new switches support StackWise Plus and a new feature called StackPower. They also have redundant power supplies too! StackPower is really cool and you can read my other blog post for more news on that.

If you want more information on the new switch line, you can read more about it here.

-RP

Well essentially, you take a bunch of switches, stack them using the stackpower cables, and then all that power is pooled for use amongst all the switches. So your power is essentially virtualized! All that power can be used by any switch!

This means that power supplies can out and out fail in one of the switches and the other power supplies in other switches will continue to provide power! Now that’s cool!

You can read more about it here.

-RP

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 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

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