small footprints?

[trygveah]

Cisco sems to be good at 'small carbon footprint', which is all well and good, but...

I have to nail the switches onto the wall because they no longer fit in the d@mn racks!
Not every building has a full-depth rack, unfortunately. In older buildings I have to make do with what was put in for phone patching.
And often, if we don't watch the contractors very carefully, they still sneak in shallow racks today.

And you can't get a full-depth 8U rack.
(For smaller locations)

Having a bunch of 2960 8ports is a mess both in the rack and management wise.

Is it really that difficult to build shallow-depth switches?

I'd love 24port or 48port switches that's no deeper than the stone-age 2950 (9.5" ), even if they were 2U instead of 1U...

Sorry... Just wenting...
(About to start replacing 3750-24port switches with 2960XR-48ports... and in dire need of a shoehorn... )
 

[devils_advocate]

It seemed to me that switches starting being 45-50cm deep when PoE and stackable switches came out.

You have to think of the features such as stacking, PoE, power stacking, redundant PSU's etc.

If you want all these features, then you are going to get deeper switches to accommodate bigger PSU's and fans etc for cooling.

The can't get wider so they will need to get deeper :)

[trygveah]

Why not go higher?

It's often much easier to fit a shallow 2U unit in an old rack than a deep 1U.