I recently joined a small consulting company and am facing a dilemma.
Some of their customers are not-so-small companies with many of them having inter-state communications.
A couple of them are running 3750's as their core switches which are maxing out on CPU utilization. On layer two networks no less!
The recommendation of my company is to upgrade them to 3850's and in one case to 4500-X's. I challenged my superiors on the hardware selection and the response was "Don't believe the Cisco marketing crap". Being the new kid on the block I am not ready to take my superiors on.
I am concerned that these choices are not going to alleviate the performance issues and are merely going to push the CPU performance issues up a level (ie turning the 3750's into distribution switches).
My question is this:
What facts or arguments can I make to buttress my contention that these core switches should be core-designed switches, such 0as 6500's or even possibly Nexus based cores? When does an access or aggregation switch stop being suitable for a core switch?
