Cisco Nexus

[kefkef]

Anybody here had a chance to work with any of these switches? Next project looming for me is to engage Cisco and partners to refresh a 2 site network (inc 2 computer rooms) that is currently 'cored' by 4 ageing 6509 chassis with modules (gig to the computer rooms, 10/100mb to desktop) with a variety deparmental switching devices (anything from 24xx to 35xx/37xx switches).

Before looking into it wanted to know if we could benefit from the Nexus range of switches or just stick with the 65XX for the cores?

 

[bigredshark]

They're only any use if you have a use for converged ethernet and the fibre channel (and DCE) and even then it's pretty marginal to be honest, the most interesting product in the range is the 1000v (i think) virtual switch.

I wouldn't fancy spending cash on new 6500s these days, they seem a bit long in the tooth even with the newer modules and compare rather unfavourably with most other manufacturers (either on price or features or both). If you're stuck with Cisco then fair enough but otherwise I'd at least speak to other manufacturers.

 

[kefkef]

Fairly stuck with Cisco, all the guys are at least CCNA, most are a bit further up the food chain in terms of knowledge/experience. That, plus a shift from Cisco would be a fairly substantial move (Cisco house for 14yrs) in terms of strategic supplier. I noticed with the 7000 you can go down the route of multiple virtual switches.

What other manufacturers do you think would stack up better? Brocade? Juniper?

 

[bigredshark]

Fairly stuck with Cisco, all the guys are at least CCNA, most are a bit further up the food chain in terms of knowledge/experience. That, plus a shift from Cisco would be a fairly substantial move (Cisco house for 14yrs) in terms of strategic supplier. I noticed with the 7000 you can go down the route of multiple virtual switches.

What other manufacturers do you think would stack up better? Brocade? Juniper?

Would be my favorites for the job, I have a love/hate relationship with Brocade, they have more code bugs than I'm entirely comfortable with but support is ultra responsive and being smaller than Cisco they care about us (we're spending millions a year but Cisco couldn't care less about us by all accounts, Brocade I can have their directors in the office tomorrow if I get sufficiently angry with them).

Juniper are rock solid as always but I struggle to recommend them here, JUNOS is the best router/switch OS out there by a long way (even IOS XR is rubbish by comparison) but it's very different if you haven't used it before and they are not cheap. They beat Cisco on features (and reliability) hands down but not on price.

Brocade have the advantage of a Cisco like CLI with a few sensible modifications (the changes to assigning VLANs make sense certainly).

Certainly there's nothing wrong with Cisco for the job, with the newer supervisors and line cards in particular it'll work just fine but it's not stand out best in class by any measure any more. The 6509-V-E is a good box for sure, but if you started from scratch it's difficult to see any reason for choosing it over the competition.

 

[Goliath]

I noticed with the 7000 you can go down the route of multiple virtual switches.

You can do this with the Cat6k to be honest, it's nothing new. Cisco are lining the Nexus range up as the Data Centre switch range with the 6k being moved out to the access/aggregation side of things. Be aware that it's only the nexus 7k that can do any layer 3 work - the 5000 and 2000 are just L2. Also, if you need anything along the lines of load balancing/firewall blades etc then it's the Cat6k that you'll need to look at.