Which switch?

[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

[cciesec2006]

Cisco Catalyst 6513 with MFC720 is an excellent choice. An even better
choice would be Extreme switches.

[GordonCopestake]

i had not seen the extreme networks products before, thanks for the heads up. Which products match the 6500 product line that cisco offer? How do these switches compare performance wise?

[cciesec2006]

I can't remember the extremely product lines since I last touched it
back in June 2004. But I remembered the performance on Extreme
switches blow away Cisco Catalyst 6500s switches. However, I
think 6513 with MFC 720 is an excellent choice too. Cisco TAC
support is also very good so you would be making a wise choice
by going with Cisco.

[dys152]

Hi there, buying Cisco is like buying IBM in the old days, nobody ever got sacked for buying it! High end Cisco kit is good and pretty reliable but you pay for that as well. We are staring to shift to Foundry kit on our network Edge (XMR's and BigIrons). When you start pushing Cisco kit, you do find that there are some limitations and contention within the switch (although not particularly on the 6500's). Worth comparing the cost of Foundry to Cisco though as we were surprised how much more we could get for our money.

Oh and one tip, if you are using CX4's, the cables are a bitch to run as they are so thick! They need a good nine inches clearance at the front of the switch to get round the corner! I would recommend going for 10GBASE-SR if you can afford it.

Hope this helps,

John

[RayPesek]

Check out HP as well. They have free firmware updates for everyone and a lifetime hardware warranty. I don't know if they have anything that meets your needs, though.

Ray