Presenting the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switch

Third in a series of blogs written by Cisco Switch Product Managers discussing their recently released products.

Does your office or workspace have reduced depth cabinets or not have a traditional wiring closet? Do you have a smaller satellite office but would like to provide the same services as your headquarters? Do you like the existing Catalyst 3K Series switches but find them too cumbersome to fit in a rack?

Today’s your lucky day.

Last month, Cisco introduced the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switches. The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switches are less than 12 inches deep and have the same functionality as the larger switches. The small size makes it perfect to deploy in tight wiring cabinets, racks, or places where switch depth is a concern and real estate is at a premium. With these smaller switches, you can avoid spending cash to replace the cabinets or mounting the switch at an angle. As a result, this reduces downtime to the network. The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switches enable the same uniform wired-wireless policy enforcement, application visibility, flexibility, application optimization and superior resiliency as the existing 3650 full-sized switches.

https://youtu.be/klyhugd06XQ

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switch come in 24- and 48-port Gigabit Ethernet SKUs and support all the same features as the existing 3650 switches. The only differences between the full-sized switches and the new switches is that Cisco Catlayst 3650 Series Mini Switch comes with fixed fans, fixed power supplies and support for external RPS2300 for redundancy. These Power Over Ethernet (PoE) switches support both PoE (IEEE 802.3af) and PoE+ (IEEE 802.3at standard), providing up to 30W of power. The switches have up to 4×10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ uplinks allowing the support of any high-bandwidth application. These switches also support stacking and can stack with either each other or the existing 3650 switches using the same Cisco StackWise-160 technology. In addition the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switch supports all the advanced security features such as: Flexible Netflow, Cisco Trustec, MACSec encryption and Network as a Sensor/Enforcer.

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switch is also fully integrated with Cisco APIC-EM and Cisco Prime Infrastructure for IT simplicity. The Plug and Play (PnP) app on APIC-EM can be used to simplify deployment across multiple remote sites, saving enterprise IT teams time and money. The path trace app on APIC-EM also enables detailed flow-based visibility and troubleshooting by tracing a path between two hosts. It further provides in-depth information about the nature of each hop, including information such as whether the path segment is Layer 2 or Layer 3 and which protocols are running on it.

Finally, the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Mini Switch and the full-sized Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch both use the same IOS XE software and can be deployed and managed using the same policies, and configuration for maximum operational simplicity and flexibility.

Find more information about these switches here.