James Slepicka wrote: > 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. >
I do the same thing (patch panels to switch racks) but for a different reason: routers and switches frequently have incompatible airflow compared to front-to-back rack mount servers. This way, I can keep all my server racks as front-to-back airflow and the side vent, back-to-front vent (even passive cooling) routing/switching/monitoring gear have their own special area. -- Seth Mattinen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Roller Network LLC _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
