Catalyst 3750 stacks up well

Look out, because Cisco is going gigabit. With 10Gig switches heading into the enterprise backbone at full steam and 10/100/1,000Mbps becoming commonplace in workstations and servers, Cisco has decided that Gigabit Ethernet’s day has come. To prove it, the company has released its Catalyst 3750 line of stackable switches.

Although Cisco is positioning the Catalyst 3750 as a small-business- and even remote-office-oriented product, its new StackWise stacking architecture can supply plenty of horsepower for larger enterprises. The older GigaStack stacking technology used in the Catalyst 3550 line was worth only 1Gbps, hence its name; StackWise bumps that up to a whopping 32Gbps. Additionally, the 3750 supports IPv6, which means shops using that technology will be able to support any number of internal IP addresses.

Although there are other stackable 10/100/1,000Mbps products available today, Cisco’s 3750 series brings a new level of maturity to copper, gigabit-capable stackables. A robust, embedded management capability is bolstered  by modifiable configurations and, most important for steady performance, a stacking backplane architecture specifically designed for high-gigabit port counts.

StackWise allows you to stack as many as nine 3750s into a single logical routing unit. In this configuration, one unit acts as the master for management purposes and distributes the routing tables to all the other switches in the stack in case the master or any other switch in the stack should fail. In that case, another master takes over by default, alarms are issued, but routing continues uninterrupted.

Stack nine of these guys, and you can hook up 468 10/100Mbps ports, 252 10/100/1,000Mbps ports, or any combination your network requires.

For added flexibility, the 3750 also supports built-in SFP (small form-factor pluggable)-based Gigabit Ethernet uplinks capable of SX (shortwave), LX/LH (long wave/long haul) and ZX (extended range) connectivity, although as with all Cisco devices, these SFPs are Cisco-only. This means not only more flexible stack configurations but an easier time migrating those same switches out of a stack and into an existing edge-based job on a larger network.

Another nice touch: If a new switch is added to a StackWise stack, it can be automatically forced to alter its configuration in subservience to the reigning configuration in the stack — even if the reigning configuration is based on an older version of IOS (Internetwork Operating System) than the new switch currently has installed.

Implementing a 3750 stack means choosing the appropriate software image. Here, you’ve got two choices. First, there’s the SMI (Standard Multilayer Software Image). This image provides all the features that SMB (small to midsize business) network admins are used to, including access-control lists, standard QoS, rate limiting, and the usual RIP (Routing Information Protocol)-based routing features.

Our test switches, however, came with your second software image choice, the EMI (Enhanced Multilayer Software Image). This is the feature set that most large-enterprise network administrators will need with more advanced features such as hardware-based unicast and multicast routing and advanced routing protocols.

We managed the base configurations using console-based IOS. Although we’ve seen easier setup procedures on competing switches, we experienced no hiccups.