Advanced Features for Demanding Environments, at an Affordable Price
Your business is growing, and that means more customers, more opportunities, and more attention on your company. The only problem: Your network was built for a smaller operation. As you add more devices, applications, and users, your IT environment will become increasingly difficult and expensive to manage. Even worse, as the network becomes more complex and overloaded, your users are likely to see sluggish performance and even outages.
With more customers and employees depending on your business than ever before, a slow or unreliable network is simply not an option. You need an IT backbone that provides excellent performance, nonstop availability, and advanced security. The ideal network will be easy to manage, even as it supports more advanced features, and will be designed to grow with your company. And it is available at a price you can afford.
The Cisco® 500 Series Stackable Managed Switches (Figure 1) are a new line of stackable managed Ethernet switches that provide the advanced capabilities you need to support a more demanding network environment, at an affordable price. These switches provide 24 or 48 ports of Fast Ethernet and 24 to 52 ports of Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with optional 10 Gigabit uplinks, providing a solid foundation for your current business applications, as well as those you are planning for the future. At the same time, these switches are easy to deploy and manage, without a large IT staff.
Cisco 500 Series switches are designed to protect your technology investment as your business grows. Unlike switches that claim to be stackable but have elements which are administered and troubleshot separately, the Cisco 500 Series provides true stacking capability, allowing you to configure, manage, and troubleshoot multiple physical switches as a single device and more easily expand your network. The Cisco 500 Series switch offer models which are fanless making it one of the industry's first in stackable switches, thereby delivering increased reliability, power efficiency, and minimizing noise.
A true stack delivers a unified data and control plane, in addition to management plane, providing flexibility, scalability, and ease of use since the stack of units operate as a single entity constituting all the ports of the stack members. The switches also protect your technology investment with an enhanced warranty, dedicated technical support, and the ability to upgrade equipment in the future and receive credit for your Cisco 500 Series switch. Overall, the Cisco 500 Series provides the ideal technology foundation for a growing business.
Cisco 500 Series switches provide the advanced feature set that growing businesses require, and that high-bandwidth applications and technologies demand. These switches can improve the availability of your critical applications, protect your business information, and optimize your network bandwidth to more effectively deliver information and support applications. The switches provide the following benefits.
Easy Deployment and Use
Cisco 500 Series switches are designed to be easy to use and manage by small businesses or the partners that serve them. They feature:
- Simple-to-use graphical interfaces reduce the time required to deploy, troubleshoot, and manage the network and allow you to support sophisticated capabilities without increasing IT head count.
- The switches also support Textview, a full command-line interface (CLI) option for partners that prefer it.
- Using Auto Smartports intelligence, the switch can detect a network device connected to any port and automatically configure the optimal security, quality of service (QoS), and availability on that port.
- Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) discovers Cisco devices and allows devices to share critical configuration information, simplifying network setup and integration.
- Support for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) allows you to set up and manage your switches and other Cisco devices remotely from a network management station, improving IT workflow and mass configurations.
- The Cisco FindIT utility, which works through a simple toolbar on the user's web browser, discovers Cisco devices in the network and displays basic information, such as serial numbers and IP addresses, to aid in configuration and deployment
