The Three little Cisco Switches

The Three little Cisco Switches

The first switch I looked up was the ultra-light SD205 5 port 10/100 switch. This thing only weights 8oz and is around 3 ½” square, 1 inch thick. I never would have thought that Cisco would have built such a small switch. This switch has 5 RJ-45 type ports each port has auto cable detection, so it will know if you have plugged in a cross-over cable or a straight though cable. This port also has auto speed negotiating so it will know if your devices run at 10mbps or 100mbps. Even though this switch was designed for small businesses it still has a lifetime warranty on hardware and a 1year warranty on fans and power supply. I found this switch list for as little $23 and as much as $39.99

The next switch I looked at was the Catalyst 2960 100/1000 switch 8, 24 or 48 port switch. This is a real switch designed to be put into a rack designed with the entry-level network in mind but it does provide enhanced LAN services. The only ports I seen on this switch was the RJ-45s. It has SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), supports PoE (Power of Ethernet), a standalone fixed-configuration and something I thought was neat is a built in redundant power system for two ports. This type of switch will let you stack up to 16 switches and you get free software updates for life. The warranty is not much better then the SD205 you get “Limited Lifetime Hardware Warranty”. The prices I found for this switch series was from $70 to $2000.

The last switch I picked for my Blog is the mother of all Cisco switches. I’d like to introduce the Nexus 7000 (heck even the name is cool). This thing has everything from a modular design to it’s own O.S (Cisco NX) it was designed for data centers. Supports scalability and is designed to maintain zero down time environments. It also is “engineered for foresight to enable the adoption of new technologies in an incremental, cost-effective manner” this is neat that they can for see what will be coming out next. Wow this is some serious switching!!!!
The basic tower with nothing it costing around $11,000 and the modules I seen listed from $16,000 to $44,000!!!!!! Holy cow Batman that some real doe!!

I thought this was neat if you would like to see a nice 3d model of it that you can spin all around and look at from any angle got to this link http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps9402/ps10098/3d_model_7k-18.html