Home CCNP Study Guide Cisco Catalyst 1900 Smoothes Path For Sites Migrating From Hubs

Cisco Catalyst 1900 Smoothes Path For Sites Migrating From Hubs

Written by Wendell E. Jaynes    Sunday, 08 March 2009

Network hardware Designed for enterprise branch offices that have 100 nodes or less, the Enterprise Edition of Catalyst 1900 from Cisco Systems, with its third generation ASIC and smaller footprint, solves the needs of small to medium-size businesses looking to migrate from a hub-centric environment. Simple migration The Catalyst 1900 allows enterprises to migrate from 10Base-T hubs to a switched architecture supporting 10Base-T and 100Base-TX with strong management support (through Cisco's Internetworking OS, CiscoWorks, and CiscoView) and RMON capabilities. The switch I tested is one of four belonging to the Catalyst switch family. In our Feb. 24 issue, we reviewed Cisco's Catalyst 2820. (See Networking Product Reviews, page N/2.) The Catalyst 1900 is on the lowest-end of this managed-switch product line. It has 24 10Base-T ports with two 100Base-TX ports (there is a lower-end model of the Catalyst 1900 that has 12 instead of 24 10Base-T ports) and an AUI port on the back of the unit. The two 100Base-TX ports primarily are used for connecting the switch to servers or a high-speed backbone. The 100Base-TX ports support bandwidth aggregation as fast as 400Mbps for connection to a server or other switches or routers. All of the ports on the switch have full-duplex support -- effectively doubling available bandwidth -- and a feature called CollisionFree, which Cisco officials say reduces packet collisions. It also supports cut-through or store-and-forward switching methods. Multiprotocol support The Catalyst 1900 has three intriguing features. It supports virtual LANs, or VLANs, has no per-port Media Access Control (MAC) address limitations (it supports a maximum of 1,024 MAC addresses), and supports Ciscos Group Management Protocol (CGMP). Cisco officials said CGMP will allow the switch to selectively forward routed IP multicast traffic to multimedia nodes to reduce network congestion. I found this intriguing but was unable to test the claim because I could not generate the type of bandwidth saturation needed. However, CGMP is the kind of feature that is a must for those network managers concerned with multicast video tying up network bandwidth. The switch also has a per-port restriction of broadcast storms to reduce impact on the overall switch and network performance. The 1900 supports 1,024 VLANs with Ciscos InterSwitch Link trunking on the 100Base-T ports and as many as 64 ATM emulated LANs and 64 VLANs with separate spanning trees per VLAN. I was impressed by the breadth of documentation that came with the product. The documentation included two manuals (one for installation and configuration and the other for software on the switch) and a CD-ROM that contained all of the configuration information that I ever could have wanted on the 1900. Competing product I think the Catalyst 1900 is attractively priced at $99 per port. The Catalyst's closest competitor is 3Com's SuperStack II Switch 320, which was just released late last month. The 320 is either a desktop switch or a segment switch. In desktopswitch mode the 320 supports 13 10Base-T ports; as a segment switch it has 1410Base-T ports, two of which are 100Base-TX. The list price of the 320 is $1,395, which comes to $99 per port; this makes it a direct competitor to the 12-port 1900. But the SuperStack II 320 only supports 750 MAC addresses and is unmanaged. RMON support lags I was surprised that the Catalyst 1900 only supports four RMON groups yet doesn't support RMON 2. (It can support all nine groups through a Switch Probe Analyzer). It also has support for Telnet and out-of-band management with multilevel security support on the console. A future release of the 1900 will support HTML management. On the back of the 1900 was a port for Cisco's redundant power supply, or RPS, optional module. The RPS module has the capability of supporting the switch in the case of failure of the primary power supply. Solid gigabit backplane If Cisco's goal is to drive hub replacement with this product, I would have to say that they did an excellent job. This switch has a more than adequate Gigabit backplane and supports 1,024 VLANs and 1,024 MAC addresses. It uses a shared-memory architecture with a 3MB packet buffer vs. a shared port architecture to further reduce packet loss. Overall, the Catalyst 1900 is another solid product from Cisco that won't let you down if you are looking to move from a hub-based environment.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 March 2009 )