Cisco excites the market with new Switch announcement

Cisco have just announced three new switches:

• Catalyst 3560-X
• Catalyst 3750-X
• Catalyst 2960-S

These switches have some major changes, the first of which is (although this is a bit hazy as to the full details) a LIMITED LIFETIME WARRANTY, which if true removes a major advantage from some of cisco's switching competitors. The new switches also use the new licensing model.

The other extremely exciting part of these switches which I can confirm is a SIGNIFICANT price drop for these models.

Let's examine some of the new features of the 3560/3750-X in more detail:

- The 3750-X is still the stackable switch, while the 3560-X is still a standalone switch
- Modular Network Modules for both 3560-X and 3750-X(See picture below:)



- Industry first 30W POE on ALL ports in a 1RU formfactor
- Stackable Power! Providing redundancy across switches for your power! This is probably my favorite new feature of all the enhancements


- Enhanced Stacking (StackWise Plus) Offering both backwards compatibility and 64 Gigabits Backplane! Also offers a new technology where by the switches do not have to use the stack ring to send traffic from local ports to another local port. Totally backwards compatibile with the original stackwise so your original 3750's can still be part of the stack.
- TrustSec Security, This needs a whole blog post in and of itself but is basically a way to encrypt traffic on the wire, its an enhancement to 802.1x
- Energywise technology reduces energy consumption by up to 50 percent

Next we have the 2960's (available at an excellent price point by the way):

- 10 Gig connectivity can now be provided by 2960's
- 30W+ POE Ports now supported
- True, hot-swap stacking via Stack modules for the new 2960!
- 15.4 Class 3 POE across all 48 ports when equipped with a 740W power supply


I am truly impressed by this latest announcement from Cisco, they have listened to exactly what the customer has asked for, seen what the competition is doing and have come out and done one better than them.