Reach Out - and Access Affordable High-Speed Applications and Services

June 24, 2003

By Jenny Carless, News@Cisco

As part of its ongoing efforts to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) and educational institutions upgrade their networks and introduce intelligent services affordably, Cisco Systems today announced several new intelligent LAN switching products and enhancements. The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine II-Plus and other enhancements to the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switch, the Cisco Catalyst 2970 Series Switch and the Cisco Catalyst 2940 Series Switch all serve to extend the capabilities of customers running smaller networks - providing value through high-end networking features today while paving the way toward the enabling technologies of tomorrow.

Investing in the Network

SMBs are under pressure to increase employee productivity, customer loyalty and profitability, while maintaining low costs. Similarly, educational institutions need to provide advanced functionality, high performance and intelligent services across their networks to adequately manage information flow into the classroom. While both groups are facing a tough economy like the rest of the market, they are increasing spending on strategic investments that will make a positive, near-term impact on these challenges.

"The network represents a significant portion of the overall IT investment for small- and medium-sized businesses and education customers," says Steve Shalita, senior manager, Product Marketing, for the Cisco Catalyst 4500 series switches. "They need the latest features at an affordable price."

One industry where this technology is making a big impact is education.

Wake County School District in Raleigh, North Carolina serves more than 100,000 students in 127 schools and has selected an end-to-end network for both wired and wireless access that features Cisco technology. The Cisco Catalyst 2970, Cisco Catalyst 2940 and the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine II-Plus will serve in the district's classrooms and sub-workgroups.

"With more than 2.5 million Web requests per hour, our job is to remove barriers to give students controlled access to learning resources," said Vass Johnson, director of Network Systems, Wake County Public School District. "The common interface and centralized management of Cisco products offer improved total cost of ownership. Deploying the Catalyst 4500 Series chassis with the Supervisor Engine II-Plus gave us a high-density chassis in the wiring closet and the ability to provide the rich intelligent services and security we needed for our large student base. The Catalyst 2970 Series deployments allow us to affordably bring Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to smaller workgroup deployments like student labs, while the Catalyst 2940 Series allows us to now extend network connectivity to all classrooms because of its size, density and theft prevention options."

A Suite of New Products and Enhancements

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine II-Plus is an entry-level control module that elevates network performance and reliability. The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series is a very versatile platform that has long addressed the requirements of the enterprise and mid-range markets. The introduction of the Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine II-Plus helps SMBs and educational institutions by delivering targeted functionality at an effective price point.

"The Catalyst 4500 Series Supervisor Engine II-Plus is a great product and solution for our wiring closets. All the key features are there, especially security, which is very important to us," says Ryan Smith, director of networking for Fairbanks Capital, a Utah-based financial services company. "It gives us full features at a competitive price and doesn't require us to pay for Layer 3 functionality in the closet that we don't need."

The Cisco Catalyst 2970 Series is an affordable Gigabit-to-the-Desktop Ethernet switch that delivers wire-speed intelligent services. With 24 10/100/1000BASE-T ports, this switch is ideal for high-performance departmental workgroups and very small enterprise branch offices that need to boost network performance over existing Category 5 copper cabling. It delivers intelligent services such as advanced QoS, rate limiting, security filtering and multicast management to the network edge.

The Cisco Catalyst 2940 Series is a small, standalone managed switch with eight Fast Ethernet ports and a single integrated Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet uplink. It is designed to be used outside the wiring closet in the user workspace (e.g., a classroom or conference room) and features a durable metal shell, easy wall or under-the-desk mounting and an optional cable guard to help prevent theft. The Catalyst 2940 Series is also extremely easy to set up and configure and should be used when it's not feasible or when it's too expensive to pull additional copper or fiber cabling from the wiring closet to satisfy an increased number of end-user devices.

Bringing High End Capabilities and Services Within Reach

These new products and enhancements help enable SMBs and educational institutions to bring Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, with all the advantages that implies. "This lets customers access multiple applications and get data on and off the network faster," says Shalita. "The result is improved user and network productivity. We're talking about an order of magnitude performance increase."

And the price is right. These enhancements represent an affordable means for SMB and education customers to incorporate these advanced capabilities into their networks. Further, the interface/management consistency for customers who are already familiar with Cisco IOS Software keeps IT training costs down.

SMBs and educational institutions represent a vast range of customers that want advanced functionality and services, for typically lower density deployments, at an effective price point. With these recently announced products and enhancements, such mid-sized organizations can now enjoy the qualities of a high-end network that were previously only available to customers with significantly larger budgets.

Jenny Carless is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, CA.