The Cisco® Catalyst® 3650 Series is the next generation of enterprise-class standalone and stackable access-layer switches that provide the foundation for full convergence between wired and wireless on a single platform. The 3650 Series is built on the advanced Cisco StackWise®-160, and takes advantage of the new Cisco Unified Access™ Data Plane (UADP) application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This switch can enable uniform wired-wireless policy enforcement, application visibility, flexibility, application optimization, and superior resiliency. The 3650 Series switches support full IEEE 802.3at Power over Ethernet P.lus (PoE+), Cisco Universal Power over Ethernet (Cisco UPOE®) on the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series multigigabit switches, and offer modular and field-replaceable redundant fans and power supplies. The 3650 Series switches also come in a 12-inch lower depth form factor so that you can deploy them in tight wiring closets in remote branches and offices where depth of the switch is a concern. In addition, the 3650 multigigabit switches support current and next-generation wireless speeds and standards (including 802.11ac Wave 2) on existing cabling infrastructure. The 3650 Series switches help increase wireless productivity and reduce TCO.


Product Overview

- Integrated wireless controller capability with:
> Up to 40G of wireless capacity per switch (48-port models)
> Support for up to 50 access points and 1000 wireless clients on each switching entity (switch or stack)
- 24 and 48 10/100/1000 data and PoE+ models with energy-efficient Ethernet (EEE) supported ports
- 24 and 48 100-Mbps and 1-, 2.5-, 5-, and 10-Gbps (multigigabit) Cisco UPOE models with EEE[1]
- Five fixed-uplink models with four Gigabit Ethernet, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet, four 10 Gigabit Ethernet, eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or two 40 Gigabit Ethernet Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (QSFP+) ports
- 24-port and 48-port 10/100/1000 PoE+ models with lower noise and reduced depth of 11.62 inches for shallow depth cabinets in enterprise, retail, and branch-office environments
- Optional Cisco StackWise-160 technology that provides scalability and resiliency with 160 Gbps of stack throughput
- Dual redundant, modular power supplies and three modular fans providing redundancy[2]
- Support for external power system RPS 2300 on the 3650 mini SKUs for power redundancy
- Full IEEE 802.3at (PoE+) with 30W power on all ports in 1 rack unit (RU) form factor
- Cisco UPOE with 60W power per port in 1 rack unit (RU) form factor
 Software support for IPv4 and IPv6 routing, multicast routing, modular quality of service (QoS), Flexible NetFlow (FNF) Version 9, and enhanced security features
- Single universal Cisco IOS® Software image across all license levels, providing an easy upgrade path for software features
- Enhanced limited lifetime warranty (E-LLW) with next business day (NBD) advance hardware replacement and 90-day access to Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) support


Switch Models and Configurations

All Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Switches have fixed, built-in uplink ports and ship with one power supply. Tables 1 through 5 provide further details. Figure 1 is an image of the Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Switches.

Cisco Catalyst 3650 Mini Switches

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series adds new mini switches to the existing 3650 family of switches. These switches are less than 12" deep and quieter than the existing 3650 switches, making them perfect to deploy in tight wiring cabinets, racks, or user spaces where depth of the switch is a concern. You can avoid replacing the cabinets or mounting the switch at an angle and as a result reduce downtime to the network. These switches enable the same uniform wired-wireless policy enforcement, application visibility, flexibility, application optimization, and superior resiliency as the existing 3650 switches. They come in 24- and 48-port 10M/100M/1000M switch SKUs (WSC3650-24PDM and WS-C3650-48FQM) and support all the same features as the existing 3650 switches except that they come with fixed fans, fixed power supplies, and support for external RPS2300 for redundancy. These PoE switches support both PoE (IEEE 802.3af) and PoE+ (IEEE 802.3at standard), providing up to 30W of power for 12 ports for a total of 390W on the 24-port model and up to 30W of power for 24 ports for a total of 775W on the 48- port model. The 24-port switch has 2x1 Gigabit Ethernet SFP and 2x10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ uplinks; the 48-port switch has 4x10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ uplinks to support any high-bandwidth application. These switches support stacking and can stack with each other or the existing 3650 switches using the same Cisco StackWise-160 technology. The 3650 mini and 3650 use the same software and thus can be deployed and managed using the same policies, configuration, and so on as the existing 3650 switches. Some use cases for the 3650 mini are the following:


Small Offices and Branches

Many small branches and satellite offices where there are few employees do not have larger wiring closets because of space constraints. A typical office like this has smaller cabinets and would need a switch that can serve few employees, provide PoE support, can manage wired-wireless networks, and applies the same consistent policies as a bigger branch or office. Because of its less than 12" depth, lower noise, and support for 10G uplinks along with stacking, advanced security, and wired-wireless convergence, the 3650 mini is the perfect switch for this type of space.


Education

The 3650 mini switch extends access to labs, classrooms, and other training rooms from the central/floor distribution rooms, reducing cost of cabling and providing superior quality of service with enhanced security, wiredwireless convergence, and enterprise network features. Because of its shallow depth and lower noise, these switches are ideally suited for classrooms or confined areas.


Retail
A typical retail outlet needs to serve customers at multiple sales points, each with a POS machine, access points, phone, printer, video display with network, and some PoE powering. These retail outlets connect to the access router that connects them to the outside network and typically need switches that fit in shallow depth cabinets. Because of the 12" depth of these switches along with advanced security and networking features, they can help retailers efficiently utilize space and save on real estate cost.


Converged Wired plus Wireless Access

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series is a standalone and stackable access switching platform that enables wired plus wireless services on a single Cisco IOS XE Software-based platform. With this, Cisco has pioneered a host of rich capabilities such as high availability based on stateful switchover (SSO) on stacking, granular QoS, security, and Flexible NetFlow (FNF) across wired and wireless in a seamless fashion. Also, the wired plus wireless features are bundled into a single Cisco IOS Software image, which reduces the number of software images that users have to qualify/certify before enabling them in their network. The single console port for command-line interface (CLI) management reduces the number of touch points to manage for wired plus wireless services, thereby reducing network complexity, simplifying network operations, and lowering the TCO to manage the infrastructure. Converged wired plus wireless not only improves wireless bandwidth across the network but also the scale of wireless deployment. Each 48-port Cisco Catalyst 3650 provides 40 Gbps of wireless throughput (20 Gbps on the 24-port model). This wireless capacity increases with the number of members in the stack. This makes sure that the network can scale with current wireless bandwidth requirements, as dictated by IEEE 802.11n-based access points and with future wireless standards such as IEEE 802.11ac. Additionally, the Cisco Catalyst 3650 distributes the wireless controller functions to achieve better scalability. Each Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch/stack can operate as the wireless controller in two modes:


Mobility agent (MA)

This is the default mode in which the Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch ships. In this mode the switch is capable of terminating the CAPWAP tunnels from the access points and providing wireless connectivity to wireless clients. Maintaining wireless client databases and configuring and enforcing security and QoS policies for wireless clients and access points can be enforced in this mode. No additional license on top of IP Base is required to operate in the mobility agent mode.


Mobility controller (MC)

In this mode, the Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch can perform all the mobility agent tasks in addition to mobility coordination, radio resource management (RRM), and Cisco CleanAir® coordination within a mobility subdomain. The mobility controller mode can be enabled on the switch CLI. IP Base license level is required when the Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch is acting as the mobility controller. A centrally located Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller (WLC 5508), Cisco Wireless Services Module 2 (WiSM2) (when running AireOS Version 7.3), and Wireless LAN Controller 5760 can also perform this role for larger deployments. With mobility agents located in the wiring closets providing 40 Gbps of wireless per switch (n x 40 Gbps for a stack of n switches) and mobility controllers managing some of the central wireless functions, the converged access-based wireless deployment provides best-in-class scalability for wireless and significantly improved wireless throughput.


Flexible NetFlow (FNF)

Full visibility into the wired plus wireless traffic is achieved because of the access point Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) tunnel termination on the switch. This helps identify users and user traffic flows in order to identify potential attackers and take corrective action at the access layer before the attack penetrates further into the network. This is achieved using FNF, which monitors every single flow entering and exiting the switch stack for wired and wireless users. It also helps identify the top wired/wireless talkers and enforce appropriate bandwidth provisioning policies.


QoS

The 3650 switch has advanced wired plus wireless QoS capabilities. It uses the Cisco modular QoS command line interface (MQC). The switch manages wireless bandwidth using unprecedented hierarchical bandwidth management starting at the per-access-point level and drilling further down to per-radio, per-service set identification (SSID), and per-user levels. This helps manage and prioritize available bandwidth between various radios and various SSIDs (enterprise, guest, and so on) within each radio on a percentage basis. The switch is also capable of automatically allocating equal bandwidth among the connected users within a given SSID. This makes sure that all users within a given SSID get a fair share of the available bandwidth while being connected to the network. The UADP ASIC enables the hierarchical bandwidth management and fair sharing of bandwidth, thereby providing hardware-based QoS for optimized performance at line-rate traffic. In addition to these capabilities, the switch is able to do class of service (CoS) or differentiated services code point (DSCP) based queuing, policing, shaping, and marking of wired plus wireless traffic. This enables users to create common policies that can be used across wired plus wireless traffic. The 3650 also supports downloadable policy names from the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) when a user successfully authenticates to the network using the ISE.


Security

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 provides a rich set of security features for wired plus wireless users. Features such as IEEE 802.1x, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) snooping, IP Source Guard and control plane protection, wireless intrusion prevention systems (WIPSs), and so on enable protection against unauthorized users and attackers. With a variety of wired plus wireless users connecting to the network, the switch supports sessionaware networking, in which each device connected to the network is identified as one session, and unique access control lists (ACLs) and/or QoS policies can be defined and applied using the ISE for each of these sessions, providing better control on the devices connecting to the network.


Resiliency - Cisco StackWise-160 Technology

The Cisco Catalyst 3650 supports an optional stacking module that is based on the Cisco StackWise-160 technology. Cisco StackWise-160 technology is built on the highly successful industry-leading StackWise technology, which is a premium stacking architecture. StackWise-160 has a stack bandwidth of 160 Gbps. StackWise-160 uses Cisco IOS Software SSO for providing resiliency within the stack. The stack behaves as a single switching unit that is managed by an "active" switch elected by the member switches. The active switch automatically elects a standby switch within the stack. The active switch creates and updates all the switching/routing/wireless information and constantly synchronizes that information with the standby switch. If the active switch fails, the standby switch assumes the role of the active switch and continues to the keep the stack operational. Access points continue to remain connected during an active-to-standby switchover. A working stack can accept new members or delete old ones without service interruption. StackWise-160 creates a highly resilient single unified system of up to nine switches, providing simplified management using a single IP address, single Telnet session, single CLI, auto-version checking, auto-upgrading, auto-configuration, and more. StackWise-160 also enables local switching in Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series Switches.