Your size sounds fairly close to our situation... Do you have a spare fiber pair going to each location?
> Right now in each of the 7 buildings has a 3560G as an aggregation > switch connected back to the DC. The DC also has a few 3560G's and > 3750G's for the sans and servers. [...] > What I would like to know (costs being the biggest factor) is what > would be a better switch design for the current and future traffic in > this network. Some options I was thinking about are as follows: Without more details I'm guessing here. Like many smaller shops I've been around the thing has grown from a long time ago and there may be a primarily flat L2 design in place, maybe there are some vlans. Maybe there is some (or a lot of) daisy chaining of switches; maybe the spanning-tree configuration hasn't gotten a lot of thought. OTOH, hopefully you're in a better spot than this? In the Cisco world I think you're right on the money with Cat45xx; the 49xx series are related... Skim over this document and see if the general idea makes sense. You have L3 capable switches everywhere so it's a no brainer in a way: https://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns432/c649/ccmigr ation_09186a00805fccbf.pdf We used this as a model, a pair of 4900M switches as the core and a few 4507-E w/SUP-6E as our access switches running OSPF; it is collapsed-core w/10G links fanning out (no separate distribution layer). As a whole we are very happy with the system. The nice thing about routing everything is it fails in more pleasant ways than the typical spanning-tree disaster. The 45xx line has seen a major upgrade. You probably want a "+E" chassis instead of "-E". Also, the SUP-7E is out and it has netflow amongst other upgrades. There is an SUP-7L-E as well for a cheaper option. Check with your rep about bundles as it's definitely money saving. For the core, look at the 4900M or the newer 4500-X; these two switches are basically a semi-fixed version of the cat45xx (fixed sup, replaceable line cards). Note with sup-7 based switches you are going to IOS-XE instead of classic IOS. Another budget-wise choice for the core and aggregation may be the ME3600X/ME3800X. It's marketed at the ISP space but search through the archives of this list for discussion of it. Even if you aren't going down the road of L3 in the access layer I can't recommend enough making sure a hierarchical design is in place. It is much easier to troubleshoot and changes are much easier to implement. ~JasonG _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
