Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches

The Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches are Cisco’s lead stackable enterprise switching platform built for security, IoT, mobility, and cloud. They are the next generation of the industry’s most widely deployed switching platform. The Catalyst 9300 Series switches form the foundational building block for Software-Defined Access (SD-Access), Cisco’s lead enterprise architecture. At 480 Gbps, they are the industry’s highest-density stacking bandwidth solution with the most flexible uplink architecture. The Catalyst 9300 Series is the first optimized platform for high-density 802.11ac Wave2. It sets new maximums for network scale. These switches are also ready for the future, with an x86 CPU architecture and more memory, enabling them to host containers and run third-party applications and scripts natively within the switch.

The Catalyst 9300 Series is designed for Cisco StackWise technology, providing flexible deployment with support for nonstop forwarding with stateful switchover (NSF/SSO), for the most resilient architecture in a stackable (sub-50-ms) solution. The highly resilient and efficient power architecture features Cisco StackPower, which delivers high-density Cisco Universal Power Over Ethernet (Cisco UPOE) and Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) ports. The switches are based on the Cisco Unified Access™ Data Plane 2.0 (UADP) 2.0 architecture which not only protects your investment but also allows a larger scale and higher throughput. A modern operating system, Cisco IOS XE with programmability offers advanced security capabilities and Internet of Things (IoT) convergence.

The Foundation of Software-Defined Access

Advanced persistent security threats. The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Mobility everywhere. Cloud adoption. All of these require a network fabric that integrates advanced hardware and software innovations to automate, secure, and simplify customer networks. The goal of this network fabric is to enable customer revenue growth by accelerating the rollout of business services.

The Cisco Digital Network Architecture (Cisco DNA™) with SD-Access is the network fabric that powers business. It is an open and extensible, software-driven architecture that accelerates and simplifies your enterprise network operations. The programmable architecture frees your IT staff from time-consuming, repetitive network configuration tasks so they can focus instead on innovation that positively transforms your business. SD-Access enables policy-based automation from edge to cloud with foundational capabilities. These include:

• Simplified device deployment
• Unified management of wired and wireless networks
• Network virtualization and segmentation
• Group-based policies
• Context-based analytics

Features and Benefits

• Highest wireless scale with Wave 2 access points supported on a single switch with select models
• 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
• Intel x86 CPU complex with 8-GB memory, and 16 GB of flash and external USB 3.0 SSD pluggable storage slot to host containers
• USB 2.0 slot to load system images and set configurations
• Up to 480 Gbps of local stackable switching bandwidth
• Flexible and dense uplink offerings with 1G, Multigigabit, 10G, and 40G, with platform readiness for 25G
• Flexible downlink options with 1G and Multigigabit links
• Leading PoE capabilities with up to 384 ports of PoE per stack, 60W Cisco UPOE, and PoE+
• Intelligent Power Management with Cisco StackPower technology, providing power stacking among members for power redundancy
• Line-rate, hardware-based Flexible NetFlow (FNF), delivering flow collection of up to 64,000 flows
• IPv6 support in hardware, providing wire-rate forwarding for IPv6 networks
• Dual-stack support for IPv4/IPv6 and dynamic hardware forwarding table allocations, for ease of IPv4-to-IPv6 migration
• Cisco 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