The Cisco IE3500 Rugged Series switches deliver high bandwidth, higher power and feature rich switching performance in a rugged and modular form factor. The Cisco IE3500 Rugged Series are designed with features that enable the industrial network infrastructure to seamlessly accommodate machine vision use cases, AI-driven analysis, virtualization, large scale networks, robust security, and edge-to-cloud connectivity.

Advanced Features for Operational Technology (OT) Networks

• TSN Frame-Preemption : The IE3500 is the first Cisco IE switch to incorporate IEEE802.1Qbu and IEEE802.3br based frame-preemption technology, significantly reducing jitter and delay for time sensitive control packets.
• Enhanced Resiliency: The IE3500 supports protocols such as Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP), Resilient Ethernet Protocol (REP), and Device Level Ring (DLR) , providing redundancy and fast failover times.
• Lossless Redundancy: For deployments requiring uninterrupted connectivity, the IE3505 includes High-Availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) and Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) , ensuring seamless failover and network continuity.

Network security and Observability

• Secure Boot: The IE3500 features Secure Boot designed to ensure that only trusted and authenticated software is executed during the boot process, with its hardware-anchored root of trust in Cisco Trust Anchor Module.
• Cyber visibility: Cisco Cyber Vision built-into the IE3500 identifies connected assets, their profiles, vulnerabilities, and communication patterns to assess your OT security posture and help drive cybersecurity best practices.
• Secure remote access: Cisco Secure Equipment Access1 built-into the IE3500 enables zero-trust remote access to connected assets.
• Segmentation: Cisco TrustSec technology enables policy-based segmentation that helps reduce attack surfaces and contains threats by automatically adapting access based on user and device identity.
• Network Assurance: IE3500 can host Thousand Eyes Enterprise Agent1 that gains visibility into owned and third-party network to avoid network outages.

Flexible Management Options

The IE3500 offers multiple management choices to suit various deployment needs:

• On-Device Management: Use the WebUI or command line tool for standalone devices, providing an intuitive on-device GUI and CLI options.
• On-Premises Management: Manage the IE3500 via Catalyst Center for on-premises deployments.
• Cloud Management: Leverage Meraki dashboard for cloud-based network management, enabling simplified and centralized control.

Fabric Capabilities

The IE3500 supports Layer 3 functionality and can extend the IT fabric into the OT network. With support for Cisco Software Defined Access Fabric Edge and BGP-EVPN1 , large networks are easy to scale and manage.