In this Cisco CCNA tutorial, you’ll learn about the other main product offerings that Cisco have other than their routers and switches. Scroll down for the video and also text tutorial.
Other Cisco Devices Video Tutorial
Reed LaCoste
I’m dropping you a line to let you know that I passed the CCNA yesterday. It was hard work, but after watching your very thorough course (twice) and taking scores of practice tests at AlphaPrep, I did it.
I want to sincerely thank you for putting together a quality course. I thoroughly enjoyed learning from you.
Security
The Cisco Firewall is the Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), and you can see a picture below. The Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from Cisco is the SourceFire FirePower IPS.
That can be bought either as an appliance or more commonly now it will be either a software or a hardware module that lives inside the ASA Firewall.
Wireless
Cisco also make wireless products as well. They have Wireless LAN Controllers and Wireless Access Points. The reason that they have Wireless LAN Controllers is that you get better scalability when you deploy those, rather than having just lots of standalone and Wireless Access Points.
Collaboration
For collaboration, Cisco have Unified Communications Manager which is a software product, which is an IP-based PBX. It replaces traditional PBXs, Private Branch Exchanges, which controlled the phones that you would see in buildings a long time ago. A lot of modern companies still are using traditional PBXs, but IP PBXs are getting more and more popular.
Cisco's Unified Communications Manager is one of the most popular IP PBXs that are available. If you are going to be using the Cisco UCM to control your phones, you're also going to need to have IP phones on your desks. So, Cisco produce those as well.
Cisco also do high-end high-definition video conferencing systems. That's Cisco TelePresence, and you can see a picture of one of the available TelePresence models on the right of the picture above. Another really popular product that Cisco have is Cisco WebEx, which is used for meetings.
Data Center
Finally, there's also Data Center. You can see a picture of the Unified Computing System (UCS) blade server on the right of the picture below, as well as the blade server on the left. Cisco also have standard rackmount servers as well. With the UCS, Cisco moved into offering compute where you can actually run your servers directly on Cisco hardware.
The other main product that Cisco have for the Data Center market is the Nexus Switches. These are very similar to the standard Cisco Switches, which run the IOS software. They do exactly the same job, but these are often a bit higher-end switches on they run the NX-OS software instead.
The commands in NX-OS and IOS are very similar though. After you've learned the information on switching, you can pretty easily take those skills across to the Data Center as well.
Additional Resources
All Security Products: https://www.cisco.com/c/en_ph/products/security/product-listing.html
All Wireless Products: https://www.cisco.com/c/en_ph/products/wireless/product-listing.html
All Collaboration Endpoints: https://www.cisco.com/c/en_ph/products/collaboration-endpoints/product-listing.html
Data Center and Hybrid Cloud: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/product-listing.html
Libby Teofilo
Text by Libby Teofilo, Technical Writer at www.flackbox.com
With a mission to spread network awareness through writing, Libby consistently immerses herself into the unrelenting process of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. If not engrossed in technology, you might see her with a book in one hand and a coffee in the other.