Cisco Catalyst 3850 Aggregation Switches

In order to meet the network requirements and business needs of the biggest enterprises in the world, every business must adapt to new technologies even though that might be costly at first glance. As businesses grow, the network architecture must grow with them. In today’s fast pace business environments many leaders forget about how vital the network architecture is to their business and mainly focus to the other sectors of their company. Making the network part of your future improvements plan will increase the overall working atmosphere and your company will reach full potential in very short time. One of the main challenges of the leading networking vendors like Cisco, Juniper or HPE is to provide a simplified network management through developing new solutions and high performance devices. One of those devices is the Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches developed mainly for deployment in the Aggregation Layer of the network architecture.

Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches provide a series of features in a compact and easy to handle body. With expanded SFP+ and SFP models the Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches will ensure high speed bandwidth for your uplink and downlink ports, ready to handle all kinds of traffic possible. They also support the traditional RJ-45 media if needed. The SFP+ ports of the Cisco Catalyst 3850 support both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet modules allowing the customers to choose their own transceiver module. The fiber connections of the Catalyst 3850 provide high electromagnetic interference protection making it extremely safe to work with.

Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches are manufactured by the highest standards and out of the box optimized for the highest performance. Their switching architecture is based on the highly known Cisco Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) allowing for wire-rate traffic flow across both wireless and wired connections. In addition you can also deploy any kind of a SDN management for easier and simplified configuration.

There are a couple of different models of the Cisco Catalyst 3850 Switch Series you can choose from. All of them together with their basic properties are shown in the table below:

Additionally Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series support five different modules for improving the uplink performance:

• 4 x Gigabit Ethernet with Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) ports
• 4 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet with SFP+ ports (refer to product data sheet for model compatibility)
• 2 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet with SFP+ or 4 x Gigabit Ethernet with SFP ports
• 8 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet with Small Form-Factor Pluggable+ (SFP+) port
• 2 x 40 Gigabit Ethernet with Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable+ (QSFP+) port

It’s important to note that these modules are not included with the default switch configuration and you can choose them accordingly at the time of purchase. 

The Cisco Catalyst 3850 supports dual power redundancy where you have the option of purchasing an additional power supply. By default the switch is delivered with a single power supply.
The models which support Power over Ethernet +, also known as the IEEE 802.3at standard, have the capability to provide up to 30 Watts of power per port. This would be more than enough to successfully power any kind of IEEE 802.3at-compliant device like access points, IP phones and similar.

As part of the Cisco Distributed Intelligent Services you will find enhanced QoS features, flexible Net Flow features, advanced security features and enhanced resiliency:

• The enhanced QoS features of the Cisco Catalyst 3850 start at the access-point level and move further down to per-radio, per-service set identification (SSID), and per-user levels. This method of prioritization helps prioritize traffic based on various radios and various SSIDs, including enterprise and guest, on a percentage basis. Enabled by default is the automatic bandwidth allocation which allocates bandwidth to each user connected to a specific SSID, unless specified differently. In addition the class-of-service feature has been greatly enhanced and will handle with ease every type of queuing, policing and shaping of any wired or wireless traffic flow.
• The flexible Net Flow feature would help you gather more information about the traffic flowing in and out of the Catalyst 3850 switch. This will help the engineers predict the points of failure, provide better customer service and increase overall network performance.
• As security risk is growing with each day, Cisco engineers took their time to develop the most advanced and secure security features. With hackers trying to gain access to various networks around the world using various methods, the features like port security, DHCP snooping guard, dynamic ARP inspection and IP source guard will make sure your network is hacker free and secure. In addition to these switches Cisco improved their session-aware networking and identifies each device as a single session thus allowing for unique access lists, distribution lists or QoS polices to be applied to the specific device. This significantly improves the overall control of each connected device.
• With the Cisco StackWise feature you can worry no more about the resiliency of your network. The StackWise technology allows you to stack up to 9 independent switches in a stack and manage them as a single virtual unit. The whole stack would be updated by a single switch elected as a stack active switch. This switch is elected by the other switches in the stack.

In addition to the features mentioned above you will find a new set of essentials called Cisco Catalyst Smart Operations. These represent a set of different capabilities developed to simplify the deployment, configuration and maintenance in the local access network (LAN) layer. Under the name Cisco Catalyst Smart Operations you will find a unique set of features explained below:

• The Cisco Smart Install feature- this feature allows for the configuration of the Cisco IOS Software image without the intervention of an engineer.
• The Cisco Smart Troubleshooting- this feature offers you a wide range of debug diagnostic commands and system health options, helping you pinpoint the exact location of failure.
• The Cisco Auto Smartports- this feature provides the automatic configuration of various devices as soon as they are plugged in to the switch port.

When it comes to the deployment of the Catalyst 3850 Switches, they are mostly suitable for deployment in Campus and Branch environments. This is mainly due to their scalability and high performance which they offer to the table. The Catalyst 3850 switch would be a valuable part of your network architecture as the last part of the access layer, where all end devices connect to. When deployed in the branch part of the network architecture you would feel secure due to the Cisco TrustSec® technology, capable for network and user segmentation.

The Cisco Catalyst 3850 is one of the main candidates in today’s aggregation layers. As a result Cisco provides a wide range of optic component compatibility and their compatibility matrix is being updated on a regular basis. However, some of the most important compatible transceivers and their CBO BlueOptic OEM equivalents are shown in the table below:

If you are in search of a high performance switch you and your network infrastructure can depend on, the Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series is the way to go. In combination with the CBO BlueOptics transceivers you would strengthen your network infrastructure and prepare it for future upgrades and technology advancements.