The Cisco^® 500 Series Stackable Managed Switches (Figure 1) are a new line of stackable managed Ethernet switches that provide the advanced capabilities you need to support a more demanding network environment, at an affordable price. These switches provide 24 or 48 ports of Fast Ethernet and 24 to 52 ports of Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with optional 10 Gigabit uplinks, providing a solid foundation for your current business applications, as well as those you are planning for the future. At the same time, these switches are easy to deploy and manage, without a large IT staff.

Key Features:

• Extensive access control lists (ACLs) restrict sensitive portions of the network to keep out unauthorized users and guard against network attacks.
• Guest VLANs let you provide Internet connectivity to nonemployee users while isolating critical business services from guest traffic.
• Support for advanced network security applications such as IEEE 802.1X port security tightly limits access to specific segments of your network. Web based authentication provides a consistent interface to authenticate all types of host devices and operating systems, without the complexity of deploying IEEE 802.1X clients on each endpoint.
• Advanced defense mechanisms, including dynamic Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) inspection, IP Source Guard, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) snooping, detect and block deliberate network attacks. Combinations of these protocols are also referred to as IPMB (IP-MAC- port binding).
• IPv6 First Hop Security extends the advanced threat protection to IPv6. This comprehensive security suite includes ND inspection, RA guard, DHCPv6 guard and neighbor binding integrity check, providing unparalleled protection against a vast range of address spoofing and man in the middle attack on IPv6 networks.
• Time based ACLs and Port Operation restrict access to the network during predesignated times, such as business hours.
• Uniform MAC address-based security can be applied automatically to mobile users as they roam between wireless access points.
• Secure Core Technology (SCT) helps ensure that the switch is able to process management traffic in the face of a denial of service attack.
• Private VLAN Edge (PVE) provides Layer 2 isolation between devices on the same VLAN.
• Storm control can be applied to broadcast, multicast, and unknown unicast traffic.
• Protection of management sessions using Radius, TACACS+ and local database authentication as well as secure management sessions over SSL, SSH, and SNMPv3.
• DoS (denial-of-service) attack prevention maximizes network uptime in the presence of an attack.
• Support for the Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) standard, which reduces energy consumption by monitoring the amount of traffic on an active link and putting the link into a sleep state during quiet periods
• The latest application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which use low-power 65-nanometer technology and low power high performance ARM CPUs
• Automatic power shutoff on ports when a link is down
• LEDs can be turned off to save power
• Embedded intelligence to adjust signal strength based on the length of the connecting cable