Network upgrade with Nexus

[syedraheel]

Hi,

We are in a process to replace our old end of life switches( mostly Cisco 2950's) with some new offerings from cisco. Attached is our current network diagram. Can you please provide a merit of using Cisco Nexus switches in this design and also what will be the benifit in doing so. Again I am asking about the specific benifits which I will get in my Network  not general benifits of nexus.

Any help?

Kind Regards,

Raheel

[syedraheel]

anyone?

[Arshad Khan]

Dear Raheel,

Kindly deploy Cisco 2960 with Lan Lite image and save your company cost.

[Oleksandr Nesterov]

Hi

It's hard to say which exactly benefits you will get by using nexus because that will depend from your network requirements.

As you know nexus are datacenter switches and using them as user access devices is not a proper solution since Cisco offers many other devices in an access segment.

But for example if you connect servers to 2950 which re connected 3750 on your diagram - you can replace them with n5k with FEX - which will give you more centralized management of your network, also will allow you to you VPC for redundancy and more efficient loadbalancing.

Same with two catalysts between Netscreen and cyberguard - they will can be replaced with n5k which will run vpc offering redundancy.

But still as I have mentioned - many benefits will depend from your network requirements.

HTH,

Alex

[syedraheel]

Many thanks Alex for you reply.

Well as far as the requirements are concerened, we dont want 10Gbps+ throughput, nor do we want to consolidate SAN and LAN. Ease of management and High availibility(SiteA Active and Site B passive) is the requirement so is getting rid/

controlling of spanning tree.  So im my case, when you say I can put a n5k inplace of 2960s between Netscreen and Cyberguard. How it would be different then say putting Juniper two Ex4200 switches(Virtual Chassis) what is additional benifit of putting n5k there?

Kind Regards,

Raheel

[Devavrat Oka]

I would consider 3750s that could be stacked as L3 (CORE) and 2960s that could be stacked as L2 (ACCESS). Nexus 5k/2k would be an overkill.