Lippis Report 209: Cisco Launches New Catalyst 2960-X Access Switches

By all accounts, Cisco’s Catalyst access switch, the 2960-S/SF is the most widely deployed Ethernet switching platform in the world. It’s a hardware platform that offers 40Gbs of stack bandwidth, enough to support a stack of four switches, 2MB of buffer memory and four hardware queues. But while this platform has served Cisco’s customers exceedingly well, this July, a new Catalyst 2960 will be available— simply called the Catalyst 2960-X. Cisco promises that the 2960-X will double every benchmark of the 2960-S, as well as add a series of features that improve the platform’s ability to scale intelligently while increasing security and simplicity of deployment and operations. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we review the latest edition of the most popular access switch on the planet, the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X.