Catalyst 2900 Series

Product Overview

Cisco System's stand-alone Catalyst 2900 switch series provide 10/100 autosensing and autonegotiating interfaces for enterprise level high-speed configuration flexibility in the wiring closet. The Catalyst 2900 series is ideal for Ethernet workgroups and individual users that want the investment protection of 10BaseT and 100BaseTX connectivity alternatives without the need to replace wiring closet network devices. This product series also provides dual high-speed 100BaseTX (with MII alternative) or 100BaseFX uplinks for wiring closet riser connections to the backbone, or to servers.

The Catalyst 2900 series is part of a comprehensive line of high-performance enterprise switches designed to help you easily migrate from traditional shared media LANs to fully switched networks. These switches provide an extremely high degree of compatibility with Cisco System's tremendously successful Catalyst 5000 family of modular switches, including:

• similar switch fabric architecture

• same code image execution

• exact same enterprise feature offering

• same user interface and CLI

This important overlap will help reduce your total cost of enterprise networking by simplifying your deployment, increase your "system" compatibility alternatives, plus provide a very strong investment protection path if your networking needs change. An integral element of the CiscoFusion scalable architecture, the Catalyst switch products deliver the varying levels of flexibility and cost-effectiveness required for today's desktop and workgroup applications. The rich feature-set available on these switches enable enterprise-wide switched internetworking.

The Catalyst 2900 series supports up to 16,000 MAC addresses and provide either 14 or 26 Fast Ethernet switched ports in four configurations.

Figure 8-20 shows a rear view of the Catalyst 2901.

The Catalyst 2926 switch delivers award-winning Catalyst 5000 family performance in a compact chassis. The Catalyst 2926 is a fixed-configuration, high-density, 10/100 autosensing Catalyst 2900 family member that uses the same architecture and software as the Catalyst 5000. The switch can deliver more than one million packets-per-second (pps) throughput across a 1.2-Gbps media-independent backplane that supports Ethernet and Fast Ethernet.

The system provides Layer 2 switching and network management. The system includes two full-duplex Fast Ethernet uplinks for redundant connections to switches, routers, and servers. Users can choose dual 100BaseTX uplink ports and two Media Independent Interface (MII) ports (model 2926T), or dual multimode 100BaseFX uplink ports (model 2926F). Further, with Cisco's Fast EtherChannel technology, the two uplink ports can be configured as a single 400-Mbps fault-tolerant connection.

The system also contains 24 ports of 10/100 autosensing switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet, enabling flexible solutions for a variety of applications. High-density switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet dual protocol ports meet today's wiring closet requirements. Fast Ethernet solutions for workgroups and server farms can easily be addressed by these 10/100BaseTX switched connections.

The Catalyst 2926 chassis fits into a standard 19-inch rack, and all system components are accessible from the same side of the chassis. The chassis includes dual load-sharing, redundant power supplies. A single supply can support the entire switch, making the system highly reliable.

The Catalyst 2926 complements the entire Cisco Catalyst switch offering, allowing users to benefit from common Cisco IOS network services software features and common network management user interfaces (starting with CiscoWorks for Switched Internetworks [CWSI] 2.0).

Catalyst 2926 Switching Architecture

Features of the Catalyst 2926 switch include:

• High performance switch fabric capable of delivering over one million pps

• Users can configure individual ports with a higher-priority level to accommodate time-sensitive applications such as voice and video

• Maintains up to 16,000 active Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in the bridge lookup table

• Separate from the data path, a common management path delivers configuration information for all modules, gathers performance information, and updates operational software information

• Supports 1000 virtual LANs (VLANs) network wide using any Fast Ethernet (with ISL) interface between multiple Catalyst family systems and Cisco routers

• Supports Fast EtherChannel (FEC) Uplink bundling for channel connections up to 400 Mb/s between switches, routers and servers. Delivering optimal backbone and data center uplinks with automatic load balancing and fast cut-over on port failure that is easy to configure and manage

Comprehensive Switched Network Management

• Superior traffic management--Remote Monitoring (RMON) statistics provide visibility of network activity: statistics, history, events, and alarms groups

• Enhanced Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) functionality enables the user to mirror traffic on any port or VLAN to another Ethernet or Fast Ethernet port for analysis by a sniffer or RMON SwitchProbe device

• Support for load balancing using VLANs and spanning-tree on multiple parallel Fast Ethernet ISL trunks to increase capacity and fault tolerance between switches; Dynamic ISL Protocol (DISL) synchronizes configuration of two interconnected Fast Ethernet interfaces into ISL trunks; Fast EtherChannel technology enables aggregation of two full-duplex Fast Ethernet links for high-capacity backbone connections

• Complete VLAN solution that is easy to configure and manage: fully integrated support for spanning tree per VLAN, ISL, DISL, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP), and VMPS Dynamic VLANS

• Support for local out-of-band management through a terminal or modem attached to the EIA/TIA-232 interface; remote in-band management through Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Telnet client, BOOTP, and Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)

• Full SNMP management (gets and sets for Ethernet Management Information Base [MIB], bridge MIB, MIB II, VTP, and system extensions)

• Supports nonvolatile random-access memory (NVRAM) for storing configuration data and software images

• Managed with CiscoWorks integrated, standards-based management, including CiscoView, TrafficDirector, and VlanDirector

• Port security based on MAC address

Standard Network Protocols

• Ethernet: IEEE 802.3, 10BaseT

• Fast Ethernet: IEEE 802.3u, 100BaseTX, 100BaseFX

Standard Features

The Catalyst 2900 Series switch supports the following standard features:

Product Numbers

Table 8-21 provides product numbers for the Catalyst 2900 switch.