As the New flagship Cisco 2960 series switch, the new widely successful Catalyst 2K switches with stackable Gigabit Ethernet access switches. So what's the difference between the Cisco 2960-S, Cisco 2960-XR and Cisco 2960-X Series Switches.

Best Way to compare Cisco 2960-S vs Cisco 2960-X

Cisco Catalyst 2960S series switch is very common switch in any environment that has Cisco devices. It also got the ability to do static routers which was a nice feature. While Cisco Catalyst 2960-X switches are the next generation of the world's most widely deployed access switches. The 2960-X provides up to 80 Gbps of stack bandwidth which is 2x more compared to the 2960-S. It is now also possible to stack up to 8 switches compared to the earlier maximum of 4. They are scalable, smart, simple, and secure and at the same time provide investment protection. These switches also provide Layer 3 routing capability, application-aware intelligence, and double the scale.

Cisco 2960-X vs Cisco 2960-XR

Dual-FRU power supply with integrated fan

Layer 3 features with IP Lite feature set

Configurable 8 queues per port (standalone)

48 Ether channel groups

The Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR Switch is a fixed-configuration, stackable (with module, not included) Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides enterprise-class features for high bandwidth applications and is designed for operational simplicity to lower total cost of ownership.

Key feature of Cisco 2960-XR:

1.The Cisco hardware routing architecture delivers extremely high-performance IP routing in the Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR IP-Lite Switches

2.It offers a number of redundancy and resiliency features to prevent outages and help ensure that the network remains available

3.Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR Switch offers intelligent traffic management that keeps everything flowing smoothly.

4.The Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR Switch offer a superior CLI for detailed configuration and administration.

Here are some notable differences between 2960-X and -XR compared to 2960-S.

Dual core CPU @ 600 MHz. 2960-S has single core

2960-XR has support for dual power supplies

256 MB of flash for -XR, 128 MB for -X. The S model has 64 MB

512 MB of DRAM compared to 256 for 2960-S

1k active VLANs compared to 255 for 2960-S

48 Etherchannel groups for -XR, 24 for -X and 6 for -S

4 MB of egress buffers instead of 2 MB

4 SPAN sessions instead of 2

32k MACs for -XR, 16k for -X and 8k for -S

24k unicast routes for -XR, 16 static routes for -X and -S