switch

More Cisco gear for the SMB world!

Hello again folks! Cisco is once again bringing great product to the market place. This time hitting the SMB market with a new series of switches called the Cisco ESW 500 series.

These switches are all manageable from GUI utilities without the need for CLI. They are also priced at a great price point for your SMB customers. A lot of times when I go into SMB clients the perception is that Cisco is expensive and they instead vote to go with a different company for their switching gear. Cisco has seen the light and is now offering cheaper product in this marketspace.

The ESW 500 series is available with gigabit capability and even POE! This makes it great for the SMB company that wants to implement VOIP and reap those benefits. Cisco needs to keep releasing SMB product like this, it really will make all the others stand up and take notice! You can read more about it here.

-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