Cisco Switching
Networks continue to evolve to meet the demands of new networked applications, the bandwidth they consume, and the policies to enforce fairness and security throughout the network. Network managers are faced with the task to efficiently manage traffic loads, contain equipment and management costs, and plan for future growth.
To manage costs yet maintain—or increase—productivity, corporations are increasingly leveraging their intranets to run business-critical applications. For example, enabling technologies such as multicast are being employed to increase the sharing of information without compromising productivity. Manufacturing facilities now share resource-planning databases directly with suppliers to better plan for future capacity and decrease product lead times. IP-based telephony continues to gain acceptance as corporations realize the huge financial savings of converged voice and data networks. Corporate intranets can also be used by employees for non-business-critical applications, such as networked games and web surfing, which may consume precious network resources to the point of having harmful effects on business-critical applications.
Traffic must be segmented based upon policy—security, QoS, and traffic management; Resource contention at multigigabit rates is an expensive problem to solve with raw bandwidth. As corporations continue to leverage their intranets with an increased set of network applications (such as, multicast and ERP applications), traffic must be classified and policies enforced to maximize resource utilization, for ultimately, business goals. Multilayer services are being driven into all tiers of the network—even the wiring closet.
Desktop connectivity has migrated from 10 Mbps to 10/100 Mbps, putting more stress on the backbone to accommodate increased densities at much higher uplink rates. Backbones must also be capable of managing traffic in a way that does not require continuous capital outlay associated with meeting bandwidth needs bit for bit, driving the need for intelligent networking—the ability to grant network resources based on application, user, time and day, or predetermined policy.
Increased corporate leverage of networked applications also demands that availability is maintained end to end. This not only requires hardware redundancy options, but the software architecture to manage traffic and recognize and overcome failure conditions.
From access layer to network core, different design parameters must be used to select the most appropriate solution. For example, where low price/port and high port density may rule in wiring-closet environments, wire-rate multilayer-switching performance and policy-enforcement (such as QoS and security) features may drive the design for the network core. There is not a single equation that addresses the requirements for all tiers of the network. For this reason, the campus switching market has begun fragment into market segments which include wiring-closet switches, multilayer switches, and switching routers.
Wiring-Closet Switches (Top)
Wiring-closet switches are devices that provide client connectivity at the edge of the network. For small closets, the Catalyst® 2900 and Catalyst 3500 Series provide a number of cost-effective solutions for small to medium wiring closets. For midrange and large closets, the Catalyst 4000 and 5000 Families provide excellent modularity, scaling 10/100 densities up to 240 ports for the Catalyst 4000 Family and more than 500 ports for the Catalyst 5000 Family.
Wiring-closet switches have traditionally been Layer 2-only devices, but as networks evolve traffic profiles, these switches are increasingly employing multilayer (2, 3, and 4) services such as protocol filtering, traffic classification, and multicast. For example, both the Catalyst 4000 Family and 5000 Family provide the capabilities to set traffic priority using the class-of-service (CoS) bits in the 802.1p/Q headers; Catalyst 5000 Family switches can also classify packets via Cisco ISL header or the type-of-service (ToS) bits in the IP frame headers. Catalyst 6000 Family switches provide additional protocol support for admission control, access lists and filtering. Cisco offers the Catalyst 2900 Series, 4000 Family, and 5000 Family to address a broad set of wiring-closet requirements
Cisco Routing (Top)
In today's highly networked environments, nothing is more critical than availability-access to data, applications and content from anywhere, anytime. As enterprises and government agencies of every size become more geographically distributed, it is the branch offices that depend on the network the most. Whenever networks fail, multisite organizations lose, both in productivity and in profitability.
This new generation of routers builds services into the router hardware, enabling the simultaneous use of more interfaces and features while increasing performance of multiple, concurrent services. Built on this innovative new technology, Cisco is able to provide a networking foundation for branch environments that includes increased security via self-defending networks; self-healing, system-level analysis and management; enhanced video and communications services; and the integration of wired and wireless networks. Allowing network administrators to invest in just one box instead of four or five, the Integrated Services Router's integrated, embedded system is designed to effectively manage networking well into the company's future.
Cisco IOS Software supports an exhaustive set of standards and protocols. Based on these, each device in the network can use the network intelligence inherent in Cisco IOS Software to fully cooperate in providing resilient services. The importance of an end-to-end application services perspective cannot be overemphasized. All the benefits of deploying strategic applications evaporate if the underlying network is unreliable
The Integrated Services Router accomplishes all of the above networking requirements by working with other devices as part of a collective system-a Cisco network that is designed for high availability from end to end. Cisco integrated services routers have been engineered to interoperate with the Cisco 7200, 7301, and 7600 Series headend routers. The Cisco 7200 Series and 7301 aggregation routers specifically share the same innovative and comprehensive Cisco IOS® Software feature set, enabling customers to build a truly integrated, efficient, and highly available end-to-end intelligent information network.
