This is more or less what I do as well and I'm pretty happy with it.
Cabinets have 48-port patch panels tied over to a relay rack. In one
cabinet, the first half of the ports go to switch A, the other half to
switch B. Same thing in the second cabinet, except A/B are reversed,
so each pair of cabinets shares a pair of switches. It's effectively a
top-of-rack design, except that the switches are located at the end of
the row. See http://slepicka.net/physicaldesign.png to get an idea of
what I'm talking about. Access layer switches are 4948-10GEs w/ dual
power supplies connected to 6506s w/ 6704-10GEs in the distribution layer.
The biggest benefit of this config is that cable management is a snap
and it's really easy to replace a switch if you need to. Instead of
messing around with a switch and a ton of cables at the top of the
cabinet, I only need to move around a bunch of 1 foot cables in the
rack. I suppose the same thing could be done in the cabinet at the
expense of additional space. A ports are always the primary, and B's
are backup. With a 10Gb link to the distribution layer, that means I'm
running at about 2.4:1 oversubscription assuming everything is happy.
Downsides are that cabling can be expensive (all that CAT-6 vs. some
fiber) and that it's tough for the server guys to figure out what
switch/port they're plugging into at times.
I do hope that Cisco doesn't EOL the 4948-10GE without releasing a
switch with similar features in a 1U form factor.
James
Shane Short wrote:
I've had pretty good success doing this in the past, however, I've run
double the density and split it over two racks.
Ie, 24 Servers per rack, so a 48port switch per rack, with 48 ties
between the rack to tie it all together, each server would hit the
switch in it's own rack, then tie over to the adjacent rack.
Idea generally behind this was to have the servers/switches on
opposing phases to eliminate power problems, without having to get
Dual Power supplies in the switches themselves.
-Shane
On 29/08/2008, at 6:45 PM, Dean Smith wrote:
Surely 2 basic Switches - With Servers dual homed across giving you
independent uplinks to the core, dual control planes and dual power etc
gives far better resilience at the price point than a simple switch
with an
extra PSU ?
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gert Doering
Sent: 29 August 2008 08:34
To: Pete Templin
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Few questions regarding fixed vs modular and
when which
is better.
Hi,
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:56:51AM -0500, Pete Templin wrote:
Have you looked at their product line lately? I attended one of their
LAN Switching Update events, and learned a lot about their new
products, such as 1U 3560E models with 24 or 48 10/100/1000 ports and
two X2 10G uplinks and dual power. Might that suffice?
Still "full L3" with the L3 price tag.
Something like a 2960G-24TC with dual power would be cool.
gert
--
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
//www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
fax: +49-89-35655025
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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