All About Aruba 6100 Series
Finding the right hardware for business networks is often a challenge. You have to strike a balance between performance that allows your business to thrive and the runaway costs that are easy to incur with networking equipment.
The Aruba 6100 CX Series
Aruba built the 6100 CX series to appeal to enterprise branch offices and small and medium business (SMB) networks. The family of switches sits somewhere in the middle of high performance and high cost-efficiency, making it a great all-around choice and ideal for networks that need more power without buying the very most expensive equipment.
The design centers around reliability and simplicity, but these features do not come at the cost of security. It’s a switch series that can easily form the backbone of a reliable business network with plenty of room to scale up in the future.
Design
The 6100 CS series is built on Aruba ASIC architecture. This includes a programmable operating system (AOS-CS) that standardizes the user experience across the switches while making it accessible and easy for network administrators to manage and adjust the switches as needed.
In fact, the switches are all fully managed and feature management access through the web, a built-in GUI, CLI, cloud access, and on-premise Aruba Central Management. Each option is available and viable, allowing you to manage the switches however you see fit.
Features
These Layer 2 switches are built for ease and power. They feature 1/10GBE uplinks (up to four uplinks per switch). They are fanless to keep them quiet. They utilize Zero-Touch Provisioning, making it easy to disseminate network management to every switch in the network.
They also come with software-defined REST APIs, allowing for easier customization and deployment of proprietary resources.
Most importantly, they’re easy to deploy or redeploy as needed. This allows them to sit in that niche of providing strong networking infrastructure while still saving on administration costs and making life easier for smaller IT departments.
Specifications
As far as raw capabilities go, the Aruba 6100 Series has plenty to offer. The switches vary in performance by model, but the maximum stacking bandwidth is 176 Gbps. They also support 98.6 Mpps forwarding.
Most of the switches will have 24 or 48 ports. As mentioned before, they also have up to 4 SFP+ uplink ports.
The switches also support PoE+. This provides up to 30W of power per PoE port. The maximum power budget for the switches is 370W for the 24-port model and 740W for the 48-port model. This provides plenty of flexibility in network design and more than enough power for quite a few modern PoE systems.
The standard Ethernet ports on the switches are 10/100/1000 Base-T, meaning they support modern Gigabit Ethernet networking.
Overall, these are switches with more than enough power for most SMBs and branch offices. Yet, they still provide excellent control, customization, security, and capability while still proving easy to use.
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