Easy-to-Use Managed Switches That Provide the Ideal Combination of Features and Affordability
To stay ahead in a competitive marketplace, businesses need to make every dollar count. That means getting the most value from your technology investments, but it also means making sure that employees have fast, reliable access to the business tools and information they need. Every minute an employee waits for an unresponsive application and every minute your network is down has an effect on your profits. The importance of maintaining a strong and dependable business network only grows as your business adds more employees, applications, and network complexity.
When your business needs advanced security and features but value is still a top consideration, you’re ready for the new generation of Cisco Small Business managed switches: the Cisco 350 Series (Figure 1).
Cisco 350 Series Switches
The Cisco 350 Series, part of the Cisco Small Business line of network solutions, is a portfolio of affordable managed switches that provides a reliable foundation for your business network. These switches deliver the features you need to improve the availability of your critical business applications, protect your sensitive information, and optimize your network bandwidth to deliver information and applications more effectively. Easy to set up and use, the Cisco 350 Series provides the ideal combination of affordability and capabilities for small businesses and helps you create a more efficient, better-connected workforce.
The Cisco 350 Series is a broad portfolio of fixed-configuration managed Ethernet switches. Models are available with 48 ports of Fast Ethernet and 10 to 28 ports of Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, providing optimal flexibility to create exactly the right network foundation for your business. However, unlike other small business switching solutions that provide managed network capabilities only in the costliest models, all Cisco 350 Series Switches support the advanced security management capabilities and network features you need to support business-class data, voice, security, and wireless technologies. At the same time, these switches are simple to deploy and configure, allowing you to take advantage of the managed network services your business needs.
Business Applications
Whether you need a basic high-performance network to connect employee computers or a solution to deliver data, voice, and video services, the Cisco 350 Series offers a solution to meet your needs. Possible deployment scenarios include:
Secure desktop connectivity: Cisco 350 Series Switches can simply and securely connect employees working in small offices with each other and with all of the servers, printers, and other devices they use. High performance and reliable connectivity help speed file transfers and data processing, improve network uptime, and keep your employees connected and productive.
Secure wireless connectivity: With its advanced security features, Power over Ethernet, Auto Smartports, QoS, VLAN, and access control features, the Cisco 350 Series Switches are the perfect foundation to add business-grade wireless to a business network.
Unified communications: As a managed network solution, the Cisco 350 Series provides the performance and advanced traffic-handling intelligence you need to deliver all communications and data over a single network. Cisco offers a complete portfolio of IP telephony and other unified communications products designed for businesses. Cisco 350 Series Switches have been rigorously tested to help ensure easy integration and full compatibility with these and other products, providing a complete business solution.
Highly secure guest connectivity: Cisco 350 Series Switches let you extend highly secure network connectivity to guests in a variety of settings, such as a hotel, an office waiting room, or any other area open to nonemployee users. Using powerful but easy-to-configure security and traffic segmentation capabilities, you can isolate your vital business traffic from guest services and keep guests’ network sessions private from each other.
Features and Benefits:
Cisco 350 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 350 Series switches are designed to be easy to use and manage by commercial customers 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 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.
High Reliability and Resiliency
In a growing business where availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is critical, you need to assure that employees can always access the data and resources they need. The Cisco 350 Series supports dual images, allowing you to perform software upgrades without having to take the network offline or worry about the network going down during the upgrade.
Strong Security
Cisco 350 Series switches provide the advanced security features you need to protect your business data and keep unauthorized users off the network:
- Embedded Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protects management data traveling to and from the switch.
- Extensive access control lists (ACLs) restrict sensitive portions of the network to keep out unauthorized users and guard against network attacks.
- Guest VLANs let you provide Internet connectivity to nonemployee users while isolating critical business services from guest traffic.
- Support for advanced network security applications such as IEEE 802.1X port security tightly limits access to specific segments of your network. Web-based authentication provides a consistent interface to authenticate all types of host devices and operating systems, without the complexity of deploying IEEE 802.1X clients on each endpoint.
- Advanced defense mechanisms, including dynamic Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) inspection, IP Source Guard, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) snooping, detect and block deliberate network attacks. Combinations of these protocols are also referred to as IP-MAC port binding (IPMB).
- IPv6 First Hop Security extends the advanced threat protection to IPv6. This comprehensive security suite includes ND inspection, RA guard, DHCPv6 guard, and neighbor binding integrity check, providing unparalleled protection against a vast range of address spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks on IPv6 networks.
- Time-based ACLs and port operation restrict access to the network during predesignated times such as business hours.
- Uniform MAC address-based security can be applied automatically to mobile users as they roam between wireless access points.
- Secure Core Technology (SCT) helps ensure that the switch is able to process management traffic in the face of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
- Private VLAN Edge (PVE) provides Layer 2 isolation between devices on the same VLAN.
- Storm control can be applied to broadcast, multicast, and unknown unicast traffic.
- Protection of management sessions occurs using RADIUS, TACACS+, and local database authentication as well as secure management sessions over SSL, SSH, and SNMPv3.
- DoS attack prevention maximizes network uptime in the presence of an attack.
Power over Ethernet
Cisco 350 Series Switches are available with up to 48 PoE ports of Fast Ethernet or up to 24 ports of Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. This capability simplifies advanced technology deployments such as IP telephony, wireless, and IP surveillance by allowing you to connect and power network endpoints over a single Ethernet cable. With no need to install separate power supplies for IP phones or wireless access points, you can take advantage of advanced communications technologies more quickly and at a lower cost. Models support 802.3af PoE, 802.3at PoE+, and 802.3xx 60W PoE.
Networkwide Automatic Voice Deployment
Using a combination of Cisco Discovery Protocol, LLDP-MED, Auto Smartports, and Voice Services Discovery Protocol (or VSDP, a unique Cisco protocol), customers can deploy an end-to-end voice network dynamically. The switches in the network automatically converge around a single voice VLAN and QoS parameters and then propagate them out to the phones on the ports, where they are discovered. For example, automated voice VLAN capabilities let you plug any IP phone (including third-party phones) into your IP telephony network and receive an immediate dial tone. The switch automatically configures the device with the right VLAN and QoS parameters to prioritize voice traffic.
IPv6 Support
As the IP address scheme evolves to accommodate a growing number of network devices, the Cisco 350 Series can support the transition to the next generation of networking and operating systems such as Windows 8, Vista, and Linux. These switches continue to support previous-generation IPv4, allowing you to evolve to the new IPv6 standard at your own pace and helping ensure that your current network will continue to support your business applications in the future. Cisco 350 Series switches have successfully completed rigorous IPv6 testing and have received the USGv6 and IPv6 Gold certification.
Advanced Layer 3 Traffic Management
The Cisco 350 Series enables a more advanced set of traffic management capabilities to help growing businesses organize their networks more effectively and efficiently. For example, the switches provide static LAN Layer 3 routing, allowing you to segment your network into workgroups and communicate across VLANs without degrading application performance.
With these capabilities, you can boost the efficiency of your network by offloading internal traffic-handling tasks from your router and allowing it to manage primarily external traffic and security.
Additionally, Cisco 350 models provide static Layer 3 routing features. With these capabilities, you can minimize the need to manually configure routing devices and simplify the ongoing operation of the network.
Power Efficiency
The Cisco 350 Series integrates a variety of power-saving features across all models, providing the industry’s most extensive energy-efficient switching portfolio. These switches are designed to conserve energy by optimizing power use, which helps protects the environment and reduce your energy costs. They provide an eco-friendly network solution without compromising performance. Cisco 350 Series switches feature:
- Support for the Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) standard, which reduces energy consumption by monitoring the amount of traffic on an active link and putting the link into a sleep state during quiet periods
- The latest application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which use low-power 65/40-nanometer technology and low-power, high-performance ARM CPUs
- Automatic power shutoff on ports when a link is down
- LEDs that can be turned off to save power
- Embedded intelligence to adjust signal strength based on the length of the connecting cable
Expansion Ports
The Cisco 350 Series provides more ports per Gigabit Ethernet switch than traditional switch models, giving you more flexibility to connect and empower your business. Gigabit Ethernet models offer up to 28 ports to give you more value, versus the 24-port variety with four shared ports that’s common in the market. The Cisco 350 Series also offers mini gigabit interface converter (mini-GBIC) expansion slots that give you the option to add fiber-optic or Gigabit Ethernet uplink connectivity to the switch. With the ability to increase the connectivity range of the switches, you have more flexibility to design your network around your unique business environment and to easily connect switches on different floors or across the business.
Cisco Limited Lifetime Hardware Warranty
Cisco 350 Series switches offer a limited lifetime hardware warranty with NBD advance replacement (where available; otherwise same day ship) and a limited lifetime warranty for fans and power supplies.
In addition, Cisco offers software application updates for bug fixes for the warranty term and telephone technical support at no charge for the first 12 months following the date of purchase.
