Cisco® Field Manual: Catalyst® Switch Configuration

2-1. Catalyst Switch Families

The family of Catalyst switches is an ever-expanding clan. Starting with the acquisition of Grand Junction, Kalpana, and Crescendo in the mid 1990s and with the addition of Granite in 1999, Cisco Systems has put together some of the finest switching engineers in the world. The result it a family of switching products that offer a variety of features for deployment in campus networks.

One of the major challenges in choosing and deploying a switch in your network is understanding what functions that switch performs and how it functions within the network design. The purpose of this section is to give you a brief overview of the current Catalyst switch platforms and their basic functionalities. In addition, a brief ...