Chapter 6 Cisco Switches

Cisco Catalyst 3560-X Series Access Switch    Price  $2,000 - $3,000  depending on the options     selected

This series of switches comes with a choice of 24 and 48 ethernet ports.  All 10/100/1000, this series of switches also features Power of Ethernet (PoE).  With this feature, each port is capable of 30W of power.  This type of switch also features MAC address security, multicast routing, IPv6 routing, and an access control list for hardware.  There are a few different software versions, each allowing the switch to operate on different layers of the OSI model, primarily Layers 2 and 3.

Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series   Distribution Switch    Price  $5,000 - $24,000

This switch comes in multiply chassis configurations, including 3, 6, 9, and 13 slots.  It can support up to 576 10/100/1000 gigabit ports or 1152 10/100 Ethernet ports.  Has high availability and virtualization.  Features 2 6,000W power supplies, which are hot swappable.  No need to power off the system to remove/replace them.  These power supplies can be upgraded to 8,700W.  Each switch system can handle 2 Terabits per second and 80 Gbps per slot.  This series of switches have a wide range of specialties and features that are great for the multi slot chassis configuration.

Cisco Catalyst 4503-E        Price  around $6,500

This switch only has 3 slots but can be deployed as a core switch.  Can handle up to 6 Gbps per slot.  Doesn’t feature a supervisor engine redundancy and supports supervisor versions 7-E, 6-E, 6L-E, and V-10 GE.  Supports PoEP, with up to 240 ports, each with 30W.