[GordonCopestake]

A little off topic but thought I would ask here as there are lots of knowledgeable people here!

We are looking to replace our aging core switches with something a little more beefy. We are looking to basicly connect as many servers together at 1000BaseT as we can possibly get (with numerous VLAN's) with as fast a backplane/switch fabric as possible. The switch has to have the ability to connect our firewalls with Cx4 10Gb.

We are currently looking at Cisco 6513's with the Supervisor 720, 1 CX4 line card for the firewalls and as many 48 port gigabit line cards as we have room for. This gives us over 500 ports per switch. Are we barking up the right tree, and if so what alternatives to Cisco are there, Juniper, Foundry etc? I dont know their product lines well enough to make comparisons

Thanks in advance for any tips / comparisons