Wow. According to a recent Forbes article, there could be 9.5 billion people on the planet by the year 2075. Think how much energy will be generated by that kind of world population. This puts the emphasis on energy-efficient technologies in a whole new light. Technologies, like switches that reduce power consumption, can save businesses money. But so far, it's not enough to outweigh the other critical factors small businesses seek: resiliency, easy configuration, and zero packet loss. That's why the Cisco Small Business 500 Series switches are a home run.

A recent study by Miercom, a network consultancy, specializing in networking and communications-related product testing and analysis, favorably compared the Cisco SF500, SG500, and SG500X series of switches with similar products offered by HP, D-Link, and Netgear. The overall findings with regard to the Cisco 500 series switches:

• Easiest to configure and implement; highest capacity and scalability of configuration parameters including VLANs, MACs, ACLs, and IP routes

• Best resiliency when subjected to a DoS attack

• More efficient in terms of overall energy consumption, and the energy saving capabilities, plus more economical when measured using normalized pricing based on price per gigabit and price per PoE watt

• Forwarded line rate full mesh traffic at all frame sizes with zero packet loss

• Most extensive support for IPv6 transitions

Nice to know that if you're a small business looking to save money and power, you can have all that and more-without having to sacrifice other critical factors you need to keep your business running. You can read more about the results of the Miercom study here. Or, to learn more about how Cisco helps small businesses, visit www.cisco.com/go/smb.