Cisco has a deep understanding of the importance of your network and its role in your organization's success. Cisco switches are industry leaders in architectural scalability, operational manageability, and comprehensive resilience, and Cisco offers all types of switches for networks and applications of all sizes.

• Cisco Catalyst switches offer more than raw speed-they extend intelligent services from the core of the network to the edge, and provides the advanced quality of service (QoS), high availability, and enhanced security needed to ensure everything operates efficiently, reliably, and securely as the network grows. These industry-leading features clear the way for new opportunities, such as mobility, IP telephony and communications.
• Cisco advanced switching products include multiple Denial-of-service (DoS) attack mitigation mechanisms, integrated security service modules for high-performance threat protection and secure connectivity, Man-in-the-middle attack mitigation innovations to protect against IP phone call eavesdropping, and Identity-Based Networking Services (IBNS) to control network access.
• Cisco Catalyst switches offer leading voice-aware services that integrate with the Cisco Unified Communications family of products to make it easier to deploy, operate, and consolidate voice solutions. As a result, your users get access to new, high-quality voice applications sooner, increasing their productivity and improving business processes.
• Cisco provides organizations with new levels of control over the way that they deploy, operate, deliver, secure, and manage their applications and business services across the extended enterprise.

Portfolio

Benefits
Target Markets
Questions to Ask

Cisco Switching Products
The Cisco Catalyst Series offers one of the industry's most comprehensive portfolios of intelligent network switches. These offerings provide a continuously expanding suite of intelligent services and advanced technologies to strengthen, simplify, and extend the value of your network infrastructure, helping deliver the greatest investment protection available.

Series	Features
Catalyst 6500 Series Switches	Designed for medium-sized business, enterprise, and service provider networks. The flexible range of Catalyst 6500 options makes this platform ideal for network-wide deployments, from the data center to the wiring closet Features include embedded real-time monitoring of VoIP call quality; a wireless LAN services module, Application-Oriented Networking (AON) Module, Application Control Engine (ACE), Power over Etherner
Catalyst 4500 Series Switches	Midrange modular platform offering Layer 2 - 4 switching intelligent network services up to 136Gbps for enterprises, small- to medium-sized businesses, and service providers.  Modular 3- and 6-slot single supervisor chassis and 7- and 10-slot redundant supervisor chassis supporting numerous connectivity and service configurations Integrated Network Admission Control (NAC) and 802.1x, H/W based Control Plane Policing, integrated man-in-the middle, DoS attack mitigation, NetFlow; access control lists and SSH
Catalyst 4900 Series Switches	Fixed-configuration switches offering high-performance and highest availability in a 1 RU configuration, optimized for Datacenter top of rack server aggregation. Up to 48 10/100/1000 ports with 4 SFP ports or 48 10/100/1000 ports with two 10GbE ports Dual, hot-swappable internal AC or DC power supplies Hot-swappable fan trays
Catalyst 3750 Series Switches	Stackable fixed-configuration switches featuring, a 32Gbps interconnect for a unified, resilient system of up to nine switches for enterprise branch offices and midsize organizations. Up to 48 10/100/1000 ports plus 4 SFP ports per stackable switch Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) connectivityIntegrated PoE and IEEE 802.3af
Catalyst 3560 Series Switches	Fixed-configuration switches combining Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and PoE for enterprise LAN access and branch office deployments Up to 48 10/100/1000 ports plus 4 SFP ports, Layer 2 - 4 switching and intelligent services with dynamic IP routing and IPv6, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity  Integrated PoE and IEEE 802.3af
Catalyst 2960 Series Switches	Fixed-configuration switches offering Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with enhanced LAN services for mid-market and branch office networks Up to 48 10/100 ports or 10/100/1000 ports, Layer 2 switching with intelligent Layer 2 - 4 services, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity AC power supply failure protection with external power supply
Catalyst 2950 Series Switches	Fixed-configuration switches offering Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for branch offices, small wiring closets, and industrial deployments Up to 48 10/100 ports, Layer 2 switching with intelligent Layer 2 - 4 services, Fast Ethernet connectivity with Gigabit Ethernet Uplinks
Catalyst Express 500/520 Switches	Cisco-class switches that make advanced network services and IP Communications easy to manage for businesses with 20 to 250 employees Up to 24 10/100 ports with optional PoE or 12 10/100/1000 ports,  Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity

Benefits

• Provides  scalable, intelligent LAN switching for campus, branch and data center networks of all sizes more network switch capacity to support bandwidth-hungry applications 
• Delivers converged services support including IP telephony, voice over WLANs, and video services 
• Provides high availability and uninterrupted access to information assets enterprise wide 
• Provides greater protection against internal and external security threats 
• Allows IT administrators seek to reduce cost and complexity of network switches
• Ensures the availability of bandwidth-intensive applications 
• Enables greater simplicity in terms of automating time-consuming IT tasks 
• Provides new functionality to allow people to get the most value from their applications

Target Markets

• Integrated Security: Cisco's Switching strategy includes multiple types of protection and dramatically improves the ability of networks to identify, prevent, and adapt to security threats to ensure information privacy, protect against threats, and control access to corporate resources.
• IP Communications: Cisco's switches tight integration into the infrastructure means that each new application video, Web, or telephony is just another media type rather than an entirely different communications system. The applications themselves can intelligently communicate with the infrastructure to meet the constantly changing needs of the system.
• Financial: Cisco offers a comprehensive switching product portfolio that integrates intelligence into a company's network. The result? Financial institutions can work proactively, realize agility and productivity gains, increase profitability, and enhance customer satisfaction. Enables financial services organizations to become more customer-focused, increase profitability, enhance agility, reduce total ownership costs, and address new business challenges.
• Data Center: Cisco data center switching solutions can help transform IT infrastructure from a siloed cost center into a dynamic business enabler that addresses your toughest challenges. Cisco switches lower costs by consolidating and virtualizing servers, storage, branch office infrastructure, and physical facilities, improves responsiveness by provisioning applications and infrastructure from shared pools of computing, storage, and network resources , optimizes asset utilization by provisioning only the amount of virtualized resources required for the job, and improve resilience with built-in high availability, security, and business continuance capabilities
• Enterprise: Ensures high availability of business-critical data and applications with redundant and secure infrastructure design. Enables rapid and effortless deployment of advanced services such as IP telephony and mobility while reducing deployment times for future services rollout with a proven, stable network.
• SMB: Delivers best-in-class switching that is designed to meet the needs of growing businesses with up to 250 employees while offering non-blocking, wire-speed performance and provides a secure network foundation optimized for data, wireless, and IP Communications

Questions to Ask

1. Are you looking for a complete line of switching products that can apply and scale security or multicast services consistently across the network, provide quality of service (QoS), 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology to support new applications and devices?
2. Are you looking for a switching solution that recognizes many types of applications and understands the importance of securing and prioritizing applications running on the network to provide the best user experience?
3. Do you want to deploy LAN switch solutions that provide redundant hardware, non-stop forwarding and stateful switch over (NSF/SSO) technology, in-service software upgrades (ISSU) and software modularity?
4. Do you have a need for high security LAN switches that include Network Admission Control; Man-in-the-Middle attack mitigation; and integrated security service modules that provide virtual private networks, firewalls, intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, and many more security services?
5. Do you want a switching solution that allows IT to remotely configure and monitor network devices from a central location, automate responses via embedded event management and use real-time diagnostic management tools to troubleshoot and apply changes?