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. (For more information and to download this free utility, visithttp://www.cisco.com/go/findit.)

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.