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White Paper
Introduction
The Cisco StackPower™ technology is an innovative feature that aggregates all of the available power in a sta ck of
switches and manages it as one common power pool for the entire stack. It is one of the main features introduced
in the Cisco® Catalyst® 3750-X Series Switches (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Cisco StackPower
This white paper explains how Cisco StackPower manages power more efficiently, allowing customers to achieve
more granular control of their power use and to realize savings that reduce the total cost of o wnership (TCO) of
their Cisco Catalyst switches.
This Whitepaper covers the following topics:
● Benefits of Cisco StackPower
● Technology Overview
● Use Case for Cisco StackPower
● Intelligent Power Management
● Cisco StackPower Topology
● Modes of Operation
● Intelligent Load Shedding
● Best Practices
Benefits of Cisco StackPower
The benefits of the Cisco StackPower technology are immediately tangible, and so are the savings .
Consider a stack of switches with each switch requiring a slightly higher power budget for some extra Power over
Ethernet (PoE) devices randomly scattered in the stack. Purchasing extra second power supply for each s witch
that needs some additional power would be inefficient and expensive. With the Cisc o StackPower solution, a
common pool of power is made available and additional power can be automatically redirect ed to the appropriate
switch based on the available power budget in the common power pool.