Catalyst 2960-L Smart Managed Switch Enabling Networking For Small Businesses | Zorins Technologies LLC

With today’s day and age, connectivity has become ubiquitous. Not only do people expect a reliable and fast connectivity in their offices, but also at their favorite coffee shops and grocery stores. Setting up the network to provide such connectivity is not everybody’s cup of tea; setting these networks is complex and time consuming and most of the times small business with little to no in-house expertise, end up hiring third party companies to do such tasks. Now, with the introduction ofCatalyst 2960-L Smart Managed switches small businesses would no longer need to worry about setting up their access network.

Bringing years of expertise to masses

The unparalleled knowledge and expertise of Cisco engineering and sales teamshas been synthesized and provided to the customers in a simple, and easy-to-consume Day 0 Wizard required to configure their networks. We broke down the boundaries between a Switch and an Access Point by allowing users to configure not only their Catalyst 2960-L series switches, but also Mobility Express Access points from the same Web UI thus allowing small business a single pane of glass to configure everything they need to provide connectivity to their customers.

Set up your small office in just three clicks!

Using day 0 wizard, powered by Cisco Configuration Professional for Catalyst (CCPC) is simple and quick! Power on the switch, connect the Access Point to any port and press the mode button on the switch, and the Day 0 Wizard is ready for you to configure.

Once you enter the wizard, there are just three steps that a user needs to follow in order to complete their network’s configuration. The wizard provides for context based helps and tips providing detailed overview of what that particular field really means and how the user should go about completing them. First, it asks for some basic configuration required to identify and connect to the devices followed by interface configuration wherein the user provides their network segregation intent, and enabling SVIs and DHCP Services over these network segments has never been easier.

Lastly, the wizard would ask for Wireless specific details which it could not derive from the previous two steps such as the Country to determine RF parameters, SSID and the security mechanism to authenticate clients over.

Once a user finishes these three steps, they have successfully set up their entire access layer in one go Cisco recommended best practices enabled out of the box. So, all the people, who could not get their SSID to work because they either did not allow proper VLANs on switchport or did not set the correct native VLAN for AP management network, worry no more, Cisco is here for you! Once the network is set up, CCPC also provides a comprehensive dashboard to allow customers to monitor their device from a single pane of glass.

Conclusion

Cisco has been a leader in enterprise networking for decades and now brings the same reliability and enterprise quality to SMB with the introduction of new Catalyst 2960-L Smart Managed switches. Together with Cisco Catalyst and Mobility Express, customers do not need to be IT experts to set up their network with ease and quickness.
Source:- cisco.com

How to enabling a secure IoT experience with Catalyst 9000 Switches | Zorins Technologies LLC

Business adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) is picking up and entering mainstream production environment. At last, industry is moving away from pilot projects and proofs-of-concept and are beginning to run their businesses on IoT, a recent study shows that 69% of organizations are adopting or planning to adopt IoT. To have these IoT devices on board, organizations now expect more out of their campus network than moving data.

The Catalyst 9000 family has been designed from ground up to meet the needs of growing IoT devices. Long before 802.3bt became a standard, Catalyst 9000 family of switches provided Cisco Universal Power over Ethernet to power end points that require up to 60W of power. Enabling endpoints does not just stop by providing increased power, but by ensuring resilient, constant and immediate delivery of such power to these business-critical endpoints. The Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver on that need through their industry leading innovations such as Perpetual PoE, Fast PoE and 2-event classification. Such innovation are not only limited to leading platforms, but are now available to all with Catalyst 9200, that can support full PoE+ on all ports and also deliver on the various PoE innovations.

With more and more IoT endpoints being onboarded to the network, security of these devices becomes quintessential to protect network against breaches. Using the power of UADP ASIC, Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver security on hardware to ensure that security does not come with a compromise on network performance. Every Catalyst 9000 switch, including the recently introduced Catalyst 9200 supports MACsec, a technology that does link encryption between host-to-switch and switch-to-switch to secure the link by maintaining integrity and confidentiality of data being sent. We are taking this notion of securing network even further through Encrypted Traffic Analytics that helps detect encrypted malware without ever having the need to decrypt the packet for inspection.

Enabling such massive numbers of IoT endpoints increases an organizations’ attack footprint. To ensure such attack surface is contained, segmentation becomes key. Cisco, through industry-leading Software Defined Access architecture makes the job easy. SD-Access simplifies network segmentation and provides end-to-end automation capabilities along with consistent secure policy-based automation. Software defined access and network assurance capabilities together makes managing security violations and network malfunctions simple. With the advent of Catalyst 9200, now this architecture can become a reality for all sized organizations.

And with support for SD-Access Extension for IoT, organizations can now extend their policies to even wider deployments!
For the needs of organizations of all sizes as they try to bring in more and more IOT devices, Cisco has a solution for all. From small organizations or branch campus using Catalyst 9200 up to a large business critical enterprise using Catalyst 9300/9400, Catalyst 9000 family of switches deliver unparalleled infrastructure to enable a secure IoT experience.
Source :- cisco.com

Growing CISCO Catalyst 9000 | Zorins Technologies

Cisco introduced Catalyst 9000 family of products in June of 2017 which soon became the fastest growing product in the history of the company. Its phenomenal success is a testament to what it brings to the customers. It truly addresses the challenges the customers are facing in this fast-changing world where digitization, security, mobility and cloud are top of mind for most of the CIOs.

Catalyst 9000 family started with a few models of Catalyst 9300, 9400 and 9500 but soon grew to address majority of the deployments and designs. Over the last 12 months, it has added new models of the Catalyst 9300 which gives the maximum density of multi-gigabit to ensure wifi6 readiness. It has introduced new uplinks of 25G for easier transition to higher speeds. Catalyst 9300 is the lead stackable access switch with rich set of technologies and scale.

Catalyst 9400 introduced a couple of new supervisors in the last one year in addition to multiple new Line Cards enabling maximum copper and fiber connectivity. With its UADP 2.0XL engine it gives even higher scale than 9300 and brings maximum High availability that the modular systems offer. The introduction of a 4-slot chassis and different variants of fiber line cards makes 9400 suitable for 1G/10G core and aggregation deployments. It also now supports SD-Access Border and Control plane functionalities.

Catalyst 9500 started with a few models of 40G and 10G. That sure became a popular 1RU aggregation product. But the introduction of 100G and 25G in the 9500 family accelerated the customers to transition to higher speed without worrying about the most cumbersome piece of networking – the wires. The customers can easily go from 10G to 25G and with the new CSR optics, customers can switch with just a software knob as soon as the other side of the wire is ready for the higher speed. This bumps up the bandwidth by 2.5 times which is also ideal since the bandwidth is going up from 1G to 2.5G at the access with multigiabit and 11ac wave 2 APs. This ensures seamless transition but it also ensures that the network architects don’t have to rework oversubscription ratios from access to the upper layers of the network. 1 --> 2.5 G, 10 --> 25G. No changes in the oversubscription ratios.

And now the 4th coming all new Catalyst 9200 is extending what Catalyst 9000 brings to the customers i.e Intent Based networking (IBN) - everywhere. It comes at a more affordable price and brings simplicity without compromise. No compromise on Security, High Availability, and the IBN experience.

For the first time, Catalyst 9200 has introduced new security features that we have not seen in this class of products before. To name a few, MACSEC 128 bit is now supported on Catalyst 9200 on all ports providing transport encryption for end to end security. Catalyst 9200 is also extending the trustworthy system features, ensuring platform and Operating Systems security against infrastructure breaches.

For the first time, Catalyst 9200 is also bringing Stateful Switch Over (SSO) in this class of product. With the help of Stackwise technology, the users can stack up to 8 members with an Active and Standby similar to Catalyst 9300. SSO ensures High Availability and a sub second convergence in case Active fails. This is so fast that if there is a video stream transmitting through the device the users will not even notice a glitch as it switches over.

For the first time, Catalyst 9200 also brings Patching (Cold) to this class of product. That means that the customers don’t have to change the entire image when there is a critical update needed and therefore can avoid long wait to update the software.

For the first time, Catalyst 9200 brings the same level of programmability and automation capabilities in this class of product as Catalyst 9000. For those customers who have other Catalyst 9000 devices, it makes it a seamless operation for the Network Operators to run the same tools across their network. Based on YANG configurational and operational models, customers can also get streaming telemetry on their favorite tools like Kibana and Grafana.

All of this was only possible because Catalyst 9200 shares the strong foundation from hardware and software perspective that the rest of the Catalyst 9000 family has. Its based on the same UADP family of ASIC. Catalyst 9200 is based on an optimized version of the ASIC – UADP 2.0 mini. The operating system that runs on Catalyst 9200 is also the same IOS XE. Due to smaller memory footprint, Catalyst 9200 runs a more optimized version of the binary. This ensures rich set of OS capabilities and it fits  a more affordable box.

Catalyst 9000 family started with a few models of 9300, 9400 and 9500 soon has grown into a nice big family of products. Catalyst 9200 just extends the reach to everyone who is jumping on the IBN journey. As customers move towards digitization, that means now everyone should have a Cat 9000.