The San Jose, California-based vendor made the announcements at the European edition of Networkers, being held this week in Cannes. As such they contrasted with the same event last year, which was more software-focused.
The first new product is the 3750-E, a version of the stackable 3750 switch with two 10Gb uplink ports. Neil Walker, Cisco’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe, said the company had previously offered a single 10Gb uplink port on the standard 3750, but that was not wire-speed; it maxed out at about 8Gbps.
The new switch can, like its peers in the family, be stacked using Cisco’s StackWise Plus 65Gbps backplane and is backwards-compatible with the rest of the portfolio, as well as with the ISR branch office router family. Also new on the 3750-E is the fact that it is entirely Power over Ethernet (PoE) enabled, whereas the other products in the range have required the user to spec up front what percentage of the ports are PoE.
Also announced was the 3560-E, which in essence is a non-stackable version of the 3750-E, and whereas a single 10Gb uplink had already been available on the stackable range, this represents the first time that connectivity has been on a box in the 3500 family. Again, there are two 10Gb ports, both offering full wire speed, and the device is end-to-end PoE. Cisco also unveiled a Twin Gigabit Converter plug-in module for these two switches, the idea being that one of the 10Gb ports can be adapted to take two GbE connections.
Then there are the two compact switches, namely the 3560 Compact and, in two different flavors, the 2950 Compact. As their names suggest, they both come in a smaller form factor than their non-compact counterparts, but just as significantly, they boast a quieter operation since they are fan-less.
The standard 3560, include the new 3560-E, is a 48-port box, while the Compact has eight 10/100 PoE ports plus one 10/100/1000 uplink port. The standard 2960 comes in 24- and 48-port configurations, while the Compact also has two versions: there is one with eight 10/100 ports and a single 10/100/1000 uplink and another with seven 10/100/1000 ports and a single 10/100/1000 uplink.
Walker said a major target for these devices is the education market, though at Networkers Cisco actually had representatives from the IT services arm of Lufthansa, talking about how they have implemented several hundred of the Compact switches on a luxury cruise ship where they are handling traffic to a couple of thousand LCD displays.
There were a couple of announcements of new power supply units, one being for the Catalyst 6500 high-end enterprise switch. This is for 8.7 kilowatts of power, which is necessary to drive 420 ports of 15.4kW of PoE, said Walker. The other is a new redundant power supply for the 3750. The idea is that, since the ISR has a second input on the back, a branch office could initially deploy an ISR with a coupe of switch ports, then if they find they need more LAN connectivity or PoE, they can add a 3750 stack and add the redundant power supply, he explained.
After all this hardware-related news, there was also one quire significant announcement on the software side, namely the ability to do in-service software upgrades on the 4500, which is the next major switch platform down from the 6500, where the facility was announced last year.
In-service software upgrading is, to be precise, the ability to do a full image upgrade of the IOS operating system on the box without having to turn it off, which is possible because the switches run dual processors, such that one can be taken off running production data, have the new image loaded and then receive all the traffic for the switch without interruption, freeing the other processor for upgrade.
This is not the same as software modularity, which is where the operating system is actually designed in such a way that individual modules can be turned off and upgraded. This is a capability in the special IOS-XR operating system on Cisco’s carrier-class devices such as the CRS-One and 12000, and was a fundamental requirement from the carrier community since they cannot afford downtime.
In-service upgrades address a similar requirement to minimize the service impact of software changes, though in this case the focus is the enterprise market. Software modularity is not possible in vanilla IOS due to the way the code was written, a fact that Cisco’s competitors in enterprise switching, or at least those with a more recently written OS, home in on to highlight a perceived shortcoming in the product. In-service upgrades is thus a way of addressing that criticism, too.
As for pricing, the 3750-E has a US list price of $9,495. The 3560-E lists at $5,995. Meanwhile the Compacts have US list prices of $1,395 for the 3560 and $895 for the 2960. The new power supply for the 6500 costs $7,000 and the redundant supply for the 3750 lists at $2,195.
