I've got a little question. Imagine you have a store. This store has several different devices, several different switch stacks. Imagine now that in one of these switch stacks, some very critical devices are connected, such as a cash till. This device only has one NIC, but you still want it to keep its network connection in case the switch it's connected to fails. So in its current state, if the member it's currently connected to fails for whatever reason, let's say it just dies - then we'll lose connectivity on our cash till. You step into the room where the switch stack is located - it's a mess. All the ports are full, VLANs are in no certain order etc, it's just a mess unless the network engineer come on site and does it him/herself.
So I want to solve this. An idea was if there's some type of smart "splitter" or such, that you place between the patch panel where the device comes in, and the switch port, that has some sort of manual failover. So you would have two stacks running. Each of these critical devices are connected to both stacks by running through this "splitter". One cable goes in (from the device > patch panel to the splitter) and two cables goes out (one to stack1, and one to stack2).
Are there any such "smart splitter panel" or whatnot that's enterprise level and somewhat "proven"?
If needed I can elaborate a bit more, but essentially what I'm trying to avoid is the actual downtime which would be involved when having to wait for whatever hours the lead time would be to replace the entire switch with a cold standby. Of course, this would mean having to use double hardware has "cold standby" that's readily available to take over in case a "flip is switched".
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