Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR IP-Lite High-Performance Routing
The Cisco hardware routing architecture delivers extremely high-performance IP routing in the Cisco Catalyst 2960-XR IP-Lite Switches:

– IP unicast routing protocols (Static, Routing Information Protocol Version 1 [RIPv1], RIPv2, RIPng, and EIGRP-Stub) are supported for network routing applications.
– Advanced IP unicast routing protocols (OSPF for Routed Access) are supported for load balancing and constructing scalable LANs. IPv6 routing (OSPFv3) is supported in hardware for maximum performance.
– EIGRPv3-Stub and PIMv6-Stub are supported as a part of the IPv6 routing suite.
– Equal-cost routing facilitates Layer 3 load balancing and redundancy across the stack.
– Policy-based routing (PBR) allows superior control by facilitating flow redirection regardless of the routing protocol configured (for both IPv4 and IPv6).
– Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) provides dynamic load balancing and failover for routed links.
– Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) for IP multicast is supported, including PIM sparse mode (PIM-SM), PIM dense mode (PIM-DM), PIM sparse-dense mode and Source Specific Multicast (SSM).

Redundancy and Resiliency
Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series Switches offer a number of redundancy and resiliency features to prevent outages and help ensure that the network remains available:

– Cross-stack EtherChannel provides the ability to configure Cisco EtherChannel technology across different members of the stack for high resiliency.
– Flexlink provides link redundancy with convergence time less than 100 milliseconds.
– IEEE 802.1s/w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP) provide rapid spanning-tree convergence independent of spanning-tree timers and also offer the benefit of Layer 2 load balancing and distributed processing. Stacked units behave as a single spanning-tree node.
– Per-VLAN Rapid Spanning Tree (PVRST+) allows rapid spanning-tree reconvergence on a per-VLAN spanning-tree basis, without requiring the implementation of spanning-tree instances.
– Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) is supported to create redundant, fail safe routing topologies in 2960-XR IP-Lite SKUs.
– Switch-port auto-recovery (Error Disable) automatically attempts to reactivate a link that is disabled because of a network error.
– Power redundancy with an optional second power supply on 2960-XR models, or with an external RPS on 2960-X models.
Enhanced Quality of Service
The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series Switches offers intelligent traffic management that keeps everything flowing smoothly. Flexible mechanisms for marking, classification, and scheduling deliver superior performance for data, voice, and video traffic, all at wire speed. Primary QoS features include:

– Up to eight egress queues per port and strict priority queuing so that the highest priority packets are serviced ahead of all other traffic.
– Shaped Round Robin (SRR) scheduling and Weighted Tail Drop (WTD) congestion avoidance.
– Flow-based rate limiting and up to 256 aggregate or individual policers per port.
– 802.1p class of service (CoS) and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) classification, with marking and reclassification on a per-packet basis by source and destination IP address, MAC address, or Layer 4 TCP/UDP port number.
– Cross-stack QoS to allow QoS to be configured across a stack of 2960-X series switches.
– The Cisco committed information rate (CIR) function provides bandwidth in increments as low as 8 Kbps.
– Rate limiting is provided based on source and destination IP address, source and destination MAC address, Layer 4 TCP/UDP information, or any combination of these fields, using QoS ACLs (IP ACLs or MAC ACLs), class maps, and policy maps.