Also, do you need line rate forwarding? Having 1,000 devices with 1Gb uplinks doesn't necessarily mean that full throughput is required... the clustering and the applications may be sporadic and bursty?
It's definitely sporadic and bursty. There's another network for high speed traffic among the nodes. The Ethernet is for stuff like program loading from NFS servers..
And... what support do you need? Just one spare on the shelf or full vendor support on every switch?
Spare on the shelf, definitely. R's, John
