10 Gigabit Ethernet Switches from Cisco
There have been a plethora of new switches being released onto the market recently, fuelled by the need for bandwidth-heavy applications, such as virtualisation and video. The product rollouts concentrate on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Power over Ethernet (PoE) and service orientation. Among the number of new products, two solutions stand out.
- Power over Ethernet extended.
SMEs now have a good midrange switch with PoE capability now that Cisco has built this feature into its popular 2960 series switches. The series also has the full IOS feature set ( monitoring, diagnostics, NAC, fault tolerance, load balancing etc). We recommend all PoE deployments should have UPS to prevent a mains outage taking down your IP phones etc.
Enhanced PoE is included with current Catalyst 3750 and 3560 switches, the capability to power a growing number of devices from a single switch port, enabling greater operational simplicity and flexibility for secure converged networks. The Cisco Catalyst 3560-E 24-port PoE configurations can support 24 simultaneous full-powered PoE ports at 15.4W for maximum powered-device support
A 24-port 2960 with eight PoE ports is priced about RRP $2700 ex GST, while the same switch with 24 PoE ports has an RRP of $4600 ex GST. Email us for your newsletter buy ...Cisco switches are usually never sold at RRP, so you may get a pleasant surprise!
If you are delivering gigabit ethernet to the desktop with a few bonded GB uplinks, you only need a few users running at top speed to create congestion. 10 Gigabit uplinks on the Catalyst E Series overcome this problem. Companies are buying 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches to speed traffic among switches at the core of their networks, known as interswitch links, which otherwise would slow under all the data coming over multiple Gigabit Ethernet links.
A nice feature is the TwinGig converter that converts a 10 Gigabit Ethernet X2 interface into two Gigabit Ethernet Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) ports. This way, you can initially use the switch with Gigabit Ethernet uplinks and later implement 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks as business demands change, without having to upgrade the access layer.
(In 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet, the MAC layer works in a linear manner - data moves serially in and out of the MAC layer with all the starting and ending control messages (including clocking and synchronization) embedded inside the data stream. With 10G Ethernet, it is much more complex. To attain a 10G bit/sec bandwidth rate, the IEEE altered the way that MAC layer interprets signaling. Rather than producing a serial stream, the 10G Ethernet layer operates in parallel to interpret data. The transmit and receive paths each comprise four data lanes, and the datastream broken down into bytes is handled in round-robin fashion across the four lanes, numbered 0 to 3. On the transmit path, for example, the first byte aligns to Lane 0, the second byte to Lane 1, the third byte to Lane 2, the fourth byte to Lane 3, the fifth byte back to Lane 0, and so on. )
The Catalyst 3750-E comes in 24- and 48-port versions. Each has 10/100/1000Mbps autosensing ports and modular port slots, which can accept dual-port Gigabit Ethernet or single-port 10G Ethernet uplinks. The switch stacks with as many as eight other 3750-E switches or older versions of the Catalyst 3750, with Cisco’s StackWise interconnection technology. This lets switches be linked by an amazing common 64Gbps interconnected backplane while being managed and configured as a single logical network device.
The 3560E-24TD switch with 24 Ethernet 10/100/1000 ports and 2 X2 10 gigabit Ethernet uplinks retails for about $9200 ex GST. Call or email us, mentioning the newsletter to get your special buy price. If we get more details on your requirements, we may be able to find a promotion that will give you leading-edge technology at a good price.
To find out more
Download a datasheet on the 2960 series
Download a datasheet on the 3560-E series
Download a datasheet on the 3750-E series
Email us for a quote on a 10G or PoE switch