How to Migrate from Catalyst 2960 to Catalyst 9000

Migration from Catalyst 2960 to Catalyst 9000

Todays, carriers, enterprises, and service providers are being surrounded by a number of competing forces. The robust growth in multimedia content, the explosion of cloud computing, the impact of increasing mobile usage, and continuing business pressures to reduce costs while revenues remain flat are all converging to wreak havoc on traditional business models. To keep pace, many of these customers are turning to software-defined networking (SDN) technology to revolutionize network design and operations.

All Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches, by integration with Cisco DNA server and using Cisco DNA subscription licenses, play an integral role as entry-level switches in Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access), Cisco’s lead enterprise architecture, and they are simply capable of providing SDN-aware features which can provide full automation to address the mentioned challenges and increase network’s stability and reliability.

A lot of customers are considering to change their previous Catalyst switches like Cisco Catalyst 2960, Catalyst 3650, Catalyst 3750 and Catalyst 3850 to Catalyst 9000 switches. Actually, there are quite convincing motives which can convince the enterprises to migrate to Cisco 9K switches.

With a robust hardware architecture and a shared code base with the rest of the Catalyst 9000 family, the Catalyst 9200 Series inherits enhanced functionalities that otherwise would not be supported on Catalyst 2960-X switches. These feature sets provide increased resiliency and security through features such as MACsec, Cisco SD-Access, and support for Cisco TrustSec.

The system default behavior on Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series switches are very much the same as that of the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series. For example, interfaces default to the layer 2 switch-port mode and IP routing is disabled.

C2960 to C9200 Migration

In order to replace Catalyst 2960 switches with Catalyst 9K switches, the Cisco Catalyst 9200 series access switches would be a smart choice.

You can find the best alternatives based on the Catalyst 2960 models in the following chart: