Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 for HP c-Class BladeSystem - key benefits

Management

• Managed with CiscoWorks, the Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 can be configured and managed to deliver end-to-end device, VLAN, traffic, and policy management.
• CiscoWorks Software also includes multilayer feature configurations such as routing protocols, ACLs, and QoS parameters.
• Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 IOS CLI support provides a common user interface and command set with all Cisco routers and Cisco Catalyst desktop switches.
• For enhanced traffic management, monitoring, and analysis, the Embedded Remote Monitoring (RMON) software agent supports 4 RMON groups (history, statistics, alarms, and events).
• Cisco Device Manager Software provides an easy-to-use, Web-based management interface through a standard Web browser. The Web interface enables less-skilled personnel to quickly and simply set up switches, thereby reducing the cost of deployment.
• SNMP v1, v2c, and v3 and Telnet interface support deliver comprehensive in-band management, and a CLI-based management console provides detailed out-of-band management.

Availability

• Spanning Tree is used to prevent physical loops in network topologies. Spanning Tree prevents physical network loops while providing redundant, multiple paths for high performance, resilient switching.
• The Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 provides a rich set of Spanning Tree features that prevent network performance degradation in today's dynamic environments.
• Per-VLAN Rapid Spanning Tree (PVRST+) allows rapid spanning tree recovery across network ports and trunks if a link fails on a per VLAN basis.
• Trunking provides redundant Switch to Switch connectivity and bandwidth aggregation.
• Port aggregation of up to 8Gbps through Gigabit EtherChannel. It permits load sharing on redundant links for effective bandwidth management over 802.1q or ISL trunks.
• 802.1Q and ISL encapsulation provides VLAN capability across trunked ports.
• Uplinks can be bonded using Cisco EtherChannel, PAgP, or 802.3ad with LACP to aggregate bandwidth for high performance, fault tolerant connections across switches.
• VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) maintains VLAN configuration consistency by managing the addition, deletion, and renaming of VLANs on a network-wide basis.
• Cisco UplinkFast and BackboneFast allow quick Spanning Tree failover recovery.

Quality of Service

• No performance penalty for enabling the rich feature set provided with the Catalyst Blade Switch 3020, such as QoS features.
• Packet classification allows the network elements to discriminate between various traffic flows and to enforce policies based on Layer 2 and Layer 3 QoS fields.
• Strict priority queuing guarantees that the highest-priority packets are serviced ahead of all other traffic.
• Supports four egress queues per port, which allows flexibility in assigning priorities for the various applications on the network.
• The Cisco Committed Information Rate (CIR) function guarantees bandwidth in increments as low as 8 Kbps.
• Up to 64 aggregate or individual policers per Gigabit Ethernet port are allowed.

Security

• VLAN - Virtual Local Area Network is a logical network topology configured on top of a physical network topology which conserves bandwidth and improves security by limiting traffic to specific groups of devices
• Supports Cisco's Identity-Based Networking Services (IBNS) which prevents unauthorized network access and insures that users get only their designated privileges.
• Compatible with Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS) so that user security profiles and authentication follow the user regardless of where they connect on the network.
• Access Control Lists (ACL's) are maintained in hardware for maximum performance and can be used to guard against denial-of-service and other attacks.
• ACL's offer a rich set of configurable security parameters at the port and VLAN levels for user access to network resources.
• 802.1x Port Security recognizes the MAC address of the device connecting to it and will set rights or limitations based on predefined security thresholds.