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Cisco Launches Catalyst 9300 series Switches

Today I am going to talk about the new launch of Cisco. Cisco Launches Catalyst switches in 9000 series and they are not Nexus. If you are confused that it is catalyst switches or Nexus Switches, well It is not Nexus Series it is pure Catalyst switches after Cisco Catalyst 6800 switches.

New Launch : Cisco 9300 series switches and these switches are not Nexus switches in case you are confused.

In addition to all the earlier switches, Cisco take a step ahead from other vendors by adding Cisco 9300, Cisco 9400 and Cisco 9500 Switches in their portfolio. These switches are excellent with the high end capabilities and has many new features added. With the help of these high end switches you can granularly expand your network at core, distribution and access layers and with these switches you will have a leverage of cloud based or Next generation solutions.

Cisco already have the following switches in their portfolio and these switches are
  • Cisco 2960 Series
  • Cisco 3650 Series
  • cisco 3750 Series
  • Cisco 3850 Series
  • Cisco 4500 Series
  • Cisco catalyst 6500 series
  • Cisco catalyst 6800 series
With the existing models as shown above, Cisco launches three new catalyst switches series and these switches are
  • Cisco catalyst 9300 series
  • Cisco catalyst 9400 series
  • Cisco catalyst 9500 series 
Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
Lets talk about the Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series. Cisco catalyst 9300 series switches are the next generation switches and is widely used for stackable switching platform. It is mainly used where you are going to deploy the next generation campuses which has a capability of security, IoT, and the cloud based solutions, These switches are the base switches for the software defined network Access switches.

Let's have a look on Cisco 9300 Series Catalyst switches
Fig 1.1- Cisco 9300 Series Catalyst Switches
Cisco 9300 series switches has a huge capability of 480 of local stackable switching bandwidth. If required you can have of 1GB, 10GB and 40 GB of high dense uplinks. With the help of Cisco 9300 series catalyst switches you can achieve PoE capabilities with up to 384 ports of PoE per stack, 60W Cisco UPOE, and PoE+. It can also deliver upto 64000 flows for flow collection.

The major changes what other Cisco catalyst switches dont have is UADP 2.0 Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) with programmable pipeline and microengine capabilities, along with template-based, configurable allocation of Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and Quality of Service (QoS) entries. These features are now in built in Cisco 9300 series switches.

Other major specifications of Cisco 9300 series catalyst switches are Open IOS XE, a modern operating system for the enterprise with support for model-driven programmability including NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG, on-box Python scripting, streaming telemetry, container-based application hosting, and patching for critical bug fixes. The OS also has built-in defenses to protect against runtime attacks.

As Cisco decided the same architecture of Cisco ACI in the campus they launched with the SD-Access on the campuses or the branch offices where Cisco 9300 series is the best fit to use. As i earlier said that Cisco 9300 is taken as next generation switches with all the future capabilities and is ready for the cloud based solutions.

I am impressed with one of the best feature which cisco announces with the launch of Cisco 9300 series switches at access layer and that feature is to identify the malware from the encrypted traffic coming from the access layer. I guess this is one of the unique feature which only cisco added in this catalyst switch Cisco 9300, 9400 and 9500 series. Cisco 9300 series switch is one of the model based on the cisco SD-Access architecture and is highly recommended when you are deploying SD-Access in their DNA architecture.

Some of the below features can be beneficial to use in the case of Cisco 9300 series switch and is also a part of SD-Access features
  • Policy automation from edge to cloud: you can use open APIs and manage.
  • Automation in the network using APIC-EM 
  • User level authentication using Cisco ISE services
  • Network visibility using NDP and Stealth-watch solutions
Cisco 9300 Catalysts series models
C9300-24T
C9300-48T
C9300-24P - POE+ feature
C9300-48P - POE+ Feature
C9300-24U - UPOE feature
C9300-48U - UPOE feature
C9300-24UX -24 Multigigabit Cisco UPOE

In my next article I will cover Cisco catalyst 9400 and 9500 series switches.