Cisco this week juiced up its Catalyst switch line with gear that boosts Power-over-Ethernet support, backup power and failover, and 10G Ethernet connectivity at the LAN edge.
New Catalyst 3750-E and 3560-E switches from Cisco target dense PoE deployments, where a majority of ports on a switch require in-line power for attached devices, such as IP phones or wireless LAN access points. These switches offer twice the PoE support as previous models and include expanded 10G Ethernet uplink options. In addition, Cisco has beefed up the power supplies on its Catalyst 6500 series chassis to power as many as 420 ports in a chassis with PoE.
Gear also being launched includes:
-- Redundant Power System (RPS) 2300, a backup power supply and power-management device for Cisco PoE switches
-- Catalyst 3560 Compact Switch and Catalyst 2960 Compact Switch, for deployment in tight spaces or public areas
-- A 10G Ethernet-enabled Supervisor Engine for the Catalyst 4500 chassis, plus advanced IOS software imaging for the device
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 a common 64Gbps interconnected backplane while being managed and configured as a single logical network device.