What to replace our Nortel 8600s with?

[Andy White]

Hello,

We have 2 x Nortel 8600s (now Avaya) that are 6-7 years old.  They have 96 1GB ports on each and we only use about 30 and the CPU average is around 2% and memory is 40% (256mb).  Going into 8600s we have 8 x Nortel 5520 48port gig switches.

We want to replace the 8600s at some point and I wondered roughly what Cisco device would possible suit us.  We are not after the best high end switches that we will never utilise, but ones that will help us grow for the next 5 years.

Here is a simple daig of what we have:

Thanks

[Gregory Snipes]

Are those 96 1Gig ports copper or fiber?

[Andy White]

All 1 GB copper, no fibre.

[Gregory Snipes]

If you wanted to stay with a modular form factor a 4506 would be plenty of switch for what you have here. However, I would say that that is probably even over kill and a pair of 3750Xs would do you just fine. The advantage of the 4500 would be if you thought that you may want to scale your back bone to 10Gig Ethernet at some point in the future.

[Andy White]

Thanks, what sort of price would a 4506 very roughly be?  I will at some point get an official quote, but are they very expensive?

[Gregory Snipes]

It very much depends on how you load it out there are 5 different current generation supervisor cards for the 4500. Here is a link to a comarison of the various supervisor cards.

That said a quick Google search found a bundle (WS-C4506E-S6L-2800) that has a a sup6 and a pair of 48 port 10/100/1000 line cards for about $13k each.

[Andy White]

That is quite reasonable considering we paid around 40k each for those cores back then.  I forgot to mention (how, I don't know), but going into each 8600 is also 6 x 3750Gs, split into 2 stacks, basically 2 x 1Gb ports off each stack as an etherchannel split into each core and are heavily used from our vm network, but I don't think it changes this too much.  We would just need to make sure the 4500s were load balanced and had lots of bandwidth between each other, do they use stack cables or bundle the 1gb cables to form an etherchannel?

The only other concern would be if we want the 4500s to handle 10gb to really future proof them, but not sure if they can do that.

[Gregory Snipes]

If stacking technology is desirable to you, you should probably go with sup7Es in the 4500s and use VSS to stack the two together. VSS is much like stackwise but uses standard 10Gb Ethernet interfaces instead of a proprietarily cable.

If not then I would probably just link the two together using the built in 10gig ports on the supervisor cards.

The 4500 platform can support up to 24 10gig ports per slot if you wanted to migrate to that in the future.

[Andy White]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand that table in relation to the 10Gb ports.  I've never used these before are they fibre or copper?

I'm not sure what the table means for the highlighted areas below, I think we will use etherchannels to the edge switches (4 x 1Gb from each switch), but need to consider 10Gb for anything in the future:

It looks like from the 6LE upwards you get 30 fibre ports or more as standard (1Gb or 10GB?), but what are 120 GE non-blocking Fibre ports and 2 10 GE / 4 1 GE (Twingig)?

I think we may replace th Nortel 5520 user switches at somepoint, they just have VLANs and not routing as this is done at the 8600s, but they do need to QoS for VOIP, so I guess the 2960Gs would be good?

Thanks

[Gregory Snipes]

The "10 GE and 1 GE uplinks" line is the number of 10gig and 1gig interfaces of the supervisor card.

The other two lines indicate the maximum number of that particular kind of interface that that supervisor can support on the whole switch. The numbers provided are also not cumulative. The sup7e cannot support 96: 10gig ports AND 192: 1gig ports, it supports 96: 10gig ports OR 192: 1gig ports. They can be mixed and matched though, you could have say 144: 1gig ports and 24: 10gig ports.

As for the access switches, I would go with 2960S at a minimum and 3560X or 3750X as a preferred option. Both of them have 1gig user ports and 10gig uplinks, but with the 3750X is much more flexible. You can get non-POE 3750Xs now, and if you decide you need it later, add it with just a power supply upgrade or you can get a 3750X with 1gig uplinks now and upgrade them to 10gig later if needed. The 3750X also has flexible licensing, you could get one with a layer 2 only licence, then if you decide you want to route at the access layer, you just upgrade the licence and you got it. Plus the 3750X has redundant power supplies for greater reliability. The only difference between the 3750X and the 3560X is that the 3750X is stackable and the 3560X is not.

[Andy White]

This is very useful!

I guess if I go with the 3560X or above I get the L3 option.  I se the 2960S's can have the SFPs installed, but not sure if they can handle 10GB uplinks or dual power for redundancy.

[Gregory Snipes]

No dual power supplies for the 2960S, but you can attach an external redundant power supply. This is not ideal as the power supply in in the 2960S is built in and not hot swapable either, so you still need to pull the whole switch if a power supply goes.

You can get them with 10gig uplinks but you have to order them that way right off the bat, they cannot be upgraded later.

[Andy White]

Hello again,

I was speaking to a supplier and he said I would need the following, does it sound about right? It is based on 1 x 4500 we will need 2.

1 x 6 slot chassis

1 x Supervisor Module (Supervisor 7L-E)

1 x 48 port Non PoE Module

1 X PSU

1 X 2nd PSU

2 x SFP + cable for interswitch link

This is with the IP Base feature set as he said the Enterprise services set is double the price!

3560X look good too as we wont stack them and just uplink them to the 4500s

Thanks

[Gregory Snipes]

I would need model numbers for the parts listed if you want any informed opinion of their compatibility and such. I will say that if you are only looking for 48 ports of GigE each (96 total), this is probably going to be a way over priced solution.

[Andy White]

No probelm, I think we preffered a chassis so it would give us the option to grow, maybe the 3 port chassis is better.

The rough info they have given me has no part numbers, I will get these.

Thanks