Making the Switch

Included in this design was the adoption of VOIP (voice over IP), the requisite in-line power infrastructure needed to deploy that technology and 1000BaseT.

According to Infonetics Research, 29 percent of medium-sized organizations used VOIP products and services in 2006. Given that POE (power over Ethernet) is a popular approach for supporting VOIP endpoints, but not the only approach, we chose a POE deployment rate of 20 percent of overall ports as the basis for this scenario. We also looked at the mix of 1000BaseT and 10/100M-bps ports.

Given the prevalence of VOIP, the organization was assumed to have deployed a fully redundant network including dual Supervisor modules, switching fabrics and redundant connections to the dual-core switches.

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