Cisco Catalyst 3850 Switch
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps12686/data_sheet_c78-720918.html
http://www.networkcomputing.com/wireless/cisco-launches-combo-switchwlan-controll/240147279
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— Deprecates the 3750.
3750, we hardly knew ye. The 3750 was possibly the coolest switch ever introduced for the data closet and beyond. It could STACK! That was pretty cool. It was a new color. That was pretty cool. It could route. That was pretty cool.
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The 3850 is an enhancement to the 3750. It does POE, routes, stacks, all of that. It also supports flexible netflow and it can be a WLC and support a number of APs inherently. Like any new switch that deprecates an old one it has higher throughput, bigger buffers, larger TCAMs, etc.
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I’m curious on the WLC support. It took me years to build a wirless infrastructure where the AP was its own WLC. It took me years to consolidate site WLCs(ap integrated) into a single box at each site. It took me years to consolidate site WLCs to a single box at the data center. Is Cisco taking a new approach here? Are we going to forget the tunnels (they suck anyway) and start using WLCs per switch port? I’m keeping a close eye on things. I’d love to get rid of those damn tunnels to every single site.
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I also have an order going out soon for a handful of 3750s. Is this the time to change to 3850s? My left says no – give it a few months :: BUGS! My right says yes, new toys!
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Cisco Nexus 6004 and 6001
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps12806/ps12807/data_sheet_c78-723667.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps12806/ps12869/data_sheet_c78-726128.html
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/introducing-nexus-6000-series/
http://d2zmdbbm9feqrf.cloudfront.net/2013/eur/pdf/BRKARC-3453.pdf
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—Deprecates the 5500 and 5000 series switches if not the 7Ks.
The weight of the 6004 is 120 pounds! That’s so heavy they specifically call it out on its own section in the data sheet. Holy Backplane Batman! It’s a 4U monster. The 6004 has a large number of 40GbE (48 without add on modules) ports and eventually 100GbE ports. It can support many more FEX than the 5500. The 6001 is a 48 port 10GbE switch with 40GbE uplinks. Let no one say that there is not enough bandwidth in a Corporate Data Center. Also new to me is the 40Gb Copper Twinax non-breakout cable. Like any new switch that deprecates an old one it has higher throughput, bigger buffers, larger TCAMs, etc. I’m looking forward to the new FEXes that will come along with these.
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I’ll have a buy going out in the next four months or so for some additional 5548s. This is a dilemma. Comparison time.
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Cisco Nexus B22 FEX for Dell M1000E
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Deprecates the 3130
—This may be old news but has just hit my radar. I was aware of the FEX for my C7000 series chassis but not for my M1000. I really did not expect these to ever come out. I’m happy to see them. These devices are of course switch blades (well FEXes) to install in Dell’s flagship M1000E product. Prior to these you had to use Dell Force10? integrated switches for 10GbE connectivity to the servers. Like any new switch that deprecates an old one it has higher throughput, bigger buffers, etc.
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I’m moving to UCS hardware so this is just something cool for me to know in case we want to upgrade our older M1000E chassis.
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Please read the pasted URLs for detailed, real, information on the products.
I love books. I’ve been hooked on fiction ever since reading my first novel “The Girl of the Sea of Cortez” by Peter Benchley (who also wrote Jaws). Growing up since then I had amassed closets full of books from thrillers, to SCI-FI, to horror, to fantasy. I’d travel to the book store after a sporting event (swimming, baseball, and cross-country) with my father every weekend and get to browse Borders book store and choose a handful of books. One of my fondest memories reading at a young age was me curled up under the covers in my bed at night, 11 years old, reading “Sphere” by Michael Crichton and being more scared as S*** reading(hearing) that alien voice screaming at me in all CAPS.
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Choosing a book involved seeing how many pages it had, reading the back cover, and often judging it by its front cover picture. The price usually seemed to align with the number of pages in the book. A tome like the unabridged Stephen King’s “The Stand” would cost more than a quick and easy such as Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5.”
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Looking at the book allowed me to judge fairly easily how long it would take to read. It also gave me some satisfaction, in a good book, in knowing that there would be ‘that much more’ story before the end of the novel or that much dissatisfaction with how much less of the novel there will be.
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A year or two ago I bought my first eReader – Kindle fire. It has completely changed my reading experience, some for the good and some for the bad. I’ve not been in a book store since receiving the Kindle. The Kindle has made my library all but meaningless. Browsing for new books is so much easier (I can see reviews, I can trial the first 50 or so pages of the book at my own leisure, I can write reviews, and there’s no one to bump into me or excuse their selves in front of me while doing it). All this but I still really miss the conventional book store. I miss Borders (which has closed), I miss the old used book store down the street (which has closed), and more importantly I miss the feel of books.
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eBooks have made page numbers irrelevant to me. They are absolutely meaningless. I just recently started reading a fantasy series called the “The Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher. I needed something easy to read since “Under the Volcano.” These books were fun. My Kindle showed that they had 4000 pages. They cost $9.99 each. That’s how much a typical book costs!! I felt ripped off. These books take at most a few hours to read. They are what I feel the fiction novel industry is moving to. You do not know how many pages the book is and so the eBook industry can flippantly charge whatever they want and the buyer will be none the wiser.
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The “Dresden Files” have pissed me off! Something is just not on the level when I pay ten bucks for a short story. Wait…was it a short story? I dont know!!! The page number mean nothing to me. ”Game of Thrones” as I recall seemed to have 30K pages on my Kindle. That means that Dresden was an eight of the length. It certainly felt like a short story and I may even plan on traveling to Barnes and Nobel s just to put my hands on one of these novels.
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eReaders need to change how the length of the book is presented. They need to judge your reading scale and then base the ‘length’ of books off of the estimated time it takes to read the book. Not some meaningless digital page number that’s different every time for some reason. The length of time to read a book (ie you have two hours left from whatever point you are at in the text) would be very helpful to me. I’d see a six hour book “Battlefield Earth (possibly the best book ever written for men)” for sale at, say $13 and then a one hour book “Dresden Files” for sale at, say $3.
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Don’t get me wrong – I really enjoyed the Dresden Files. It is a goofy cross between Lehane’s ‘Patrick Kenzie’ and Pratchett’s ‘Rincewind’. I really want to read the rest of the books in the series but at $10 bucks a pop I’ll end up spending $100 this week just to read them. Is that fair? It cant be. It should be $9.99 for the first three novels maybe.
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And I wont even go into quality over quantity. Books have never worked that way. Le Morte D’Arthur (possibly the most boring book written since the Bible) costed the same as Harry Potter at Borders. It’s not time to start saying that a 4000 page ebook costs $10 because it’s ‘better’ than that 30000 page ebook. It’s a sham. eBooks should be significantly cheaper. All I see now is the creep. I bet eBooks will actually cost MORE than a conventional book in less than a year. All they have to do is tell you that you save money (even if you didnt).
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Ok rant complete. Read Dresden, I guess, if you can afford it.
I’m a Cisco ICON wh****. I like them as they are notional and fit well in my diagrams.
Anyway, looks like they updated the icons to include the Identity Services Engine, which is becoming prevalent in my organization. Oddly enough this appears to be the only update in nearly two years. I just hope I’m not missing some goodies by only using the power point.
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac50/ac47/2.html
(I use the power point icons vs the visio – mostly because I cant tell what it looks like in visio until i drag it over)
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They have a blue and purple coloring scheme. I’m not sure why but I guess I need to start studying ISE as it is my guess it will replace ACS in the near future.
Bad – but only because I suck at this job.
Take a look at Cisco’s firewall offering. You’ll find the 5512, 5515, 5525, 5545, 5555, and 5585. Six appliances to choose from! And their capabilities slowy ramp up as the model number increases. See below:
On the surface here this seems like it could be beneficial. Let’s say you have a remote site with an Ethernet WAN circuit that provides 100Mb but can scale as needed to 1Gb and you only need firewalling. Obviously you probably only need a 5512.
What happens though, if you connect a number of servers to a separate DMZ and they each have their own vault? That means that the throughput becomes all guess work now. Sure you could get some traffic analysis done assuming you have the time, tools, servers, and support, but that would still just be estimated (and probably poorly if you do not use a very expensive network modeling tool like Guru).
This is why I suck. Most servers are 10Gb now and I just do not know what firewall I should use. So do I leave it up to the customer? Do I say that, well your non enterprise servers at that remote site or in that test building are all 10Gb connected but they probably will never really use that bandwidth and so we can include a bottle neck in the design.
Do I write these down on notepad, throw them in a hat, and select at random? Really – who knows if you need 1, 1.2, or 2 Gbps. Who knows if they need 200 or 250 or 300 Mbs VPN throughput?
Do I tell the customer to buy cheap and then if it doesnt work to their satisfaction, buy expensive later and use the cheaper firewalls on another project?
Do I buy an expensive network analysis suite like Guru and pleade that the systems guys prebuild the environment so I can gauge?
Or do I just say screw it and buy the 5555X and state that will STILL be a bottle neck for 10Gb servers.
Or do I plead with the security group to allow different level security vaults to circumvent the bottleneck firewall?
Do I tell the customer that 10Gb only belongs in an enterprise data center and so one-off solutions will be configured and so have bottle necks or be inordinately expensive? And what if they say sure we understand – which firewall are you going to use? It is still like pulling out of a hat.
What if I get real and just take a look at the average throughput of 10Gb servers (and find that their throughput is somewhere around the lines of 1Gbs with occasional spikes)? Well that seems to show me that I can go with the 5512 or 5515. But I dont feel safe with that – especially on high visibility projects (they all are these days right?).
I just do not see myself ever ordering the 5515 or 5545.
Now – If there was just one chassis, say the 5500, and this chassis was field upgradable – ie you could turn a 5512 into a 5515 and then into a 5525 and so on with a cheap RAM or processor upgrade, I would feel much safer saving money on the low end appliance.
The Catalyst 4500 switches now support VSS. If they have not already, I expect many campus engineers to start learning such terms as MEC, VSL, and relearning PagP(Yes, really).
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst4500/15.1.2/XE_340/configuration/guide/OL_27597.pdf
It’s worth noting that WCCP and L2TP break when VSS is enabled.
This brings the 4500 to the level of Core capability in the campus. It kind of did anyway since the SUP-6 where it had higher throughput than the 6500 for a short time frame.
Right now Cisco Options I think one could consider for the core for a large campus (4 or more multi-floor buildings or at least 16 MDF and IDF closets) can be the Nexus 7000, the Catalyst 6500, or the Catalyst 4500 in order of price.
This post covers what I’ve learned by navigating http://www.cisco.com. If you’re new to Cisco you may find it a daunting task in order to
a. Find the equipment
b. Find out how to order equipment
c. Find the OS for the equipment
d. Download the software
e. Find new equipment or updated items
f. Find changes to things you’re invested in
g. Designing according to best practices
h. Submit a TAC case
I’m going to go step by step on how I would procure a Cisco 4500 switch for a communications room and then support it.
Step 1. Go to http://www.cisco.com
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Step 2. Highlight “Products and Services” and click on “Switches”
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Step 3. Here you are defaulted to a newish ‘Overview’ tab. This is worthless, IMO, as the link bring you to more overview links that may be helpful to some, but are probably not helpful to most. Click on “Products & Solutions”
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Step 4. Now scroll down to “Campus LAN Switches – Access” and click on “Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches”
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Step 5. You’re now at the product’s main screen. The main screen has many an important URLs that you should be familiar with.
Everything at the top and middle are mostly marketing. Sometimes you may find something new, such as a module or feature, but that list is not comprehensive. I typically ignore it. Scroll to the bottom. Here are two of the links I use the most – “Data Sheets” and “End-of-Life and End-of-Sale Notices” If you’re not familiar with a product but think it fits your organization – make sure you click on EOL notices and be sure it’s not a dead or almost dead product! A product that is EOS is probably not for you unless you have specific reason not. Click on “Data Sheets”
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Step 6. These are the data sheets for the product. You’ll want to review the data sheets for all the supervisor modules to make an informed decision on what you need for your organization. The chassis is an important one and will help you order your equipment. Click on “Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series Chassis”
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Step 7. The data sheet is going to have a lot of the information you’ll need to design your network. First and foremost I will warn any potential buyer of equipment to READ EVERYTHING. Especially if you do not have a Cisco Sales Rep in your back pocket. You may buy the product for a feature, only to find some crazy caveat that would ruin your project. Just something basic below – you’ll notice that there are 7 slot switches, however, two are reserved for supervisor cards. This means there’s only five usable slots. This is common knowledge to most Cisco users, but to a newbie, it is not. You need to read the fine print on all data sheets. Scroll on down to the bottom.
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Step 8. Now that you’ve read the entire data sheet you’ll want to know how to order. Many many other vendor websites do not include this field. Like ALU and Erickson who have pretty awful web sites. This is where you can start to build your BOM. Pull the part numbers down here into a spread sheet and then look up the prices later. Head back to the main product page and scroll to the bottom.
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Step 9. Back on the main product page. There is a field called “Interfaces and Modules.” This URL has been in existence for as far back as I can recall on the 4500 and 6500 series switches. Interestingly enough Cisco did not copy it over to the 7000. In any case, for the 4500/6500, you’ll want to click here to review information on your power modules, line cards, supervisors, fans, etc. This is a critical URL to quickly find the modules for your order. Scroll up to the top of the main product page now.
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Step 10. Here is the support field. This field has changed a bit in the past few months but still has the same stuff I’ve needed in the past. Click on “”Software Downloads, Release and General Information”
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Step 11. Now click on “Release Notes”
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Step 12. Release notes have the information on the OS version of the product you want to procure. This is an important page to view monthly on your products to find out what new releases of OS have come out and what new hardware and software they support (in addition to what bugs they have fixed). Head back to the main page and click on “Configure” and then “Configuration Guides”
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Step 13. This is where you want to go to figure out how to configure your equipment. A person with zero experience can review these configuration guides and probably get something working with no issues. Cisco’s configuration examples are great! Search for the words “recommend” when going through these as the document creator will often state what Cisco recommends as far as configuration goes. Ok now back to main page of http://www.cisco.com and we’ll download some software.
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Step 14. Highlight support and then click on “All Downloads”. Do not do this from the product page or search for a download as that returns a bunch of fodder.
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Step 15. Click Products –> Switches. Here’s where I have a gripe. I hate how they take their products and ‘classifiy’ them into things like Branch, Data Center, etc. Some are obvious, like our 4500. Others, like the ASA Module, took me 20 minutes to find!! Now click on Campus/Core, then the 4500, then 4506-E, then Supervisor 7E.
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Step 16. Gripe – Chrome. Now I have to open IE. <SIGH> Click on IOS XE software
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Step 17. Select the OS you want to use on the left. Determining what OS to use is a tricky task, especially with highly critical infrastructure. You can find many posts on how to do it on various blogs. In any event, figure out which one you want and then click download and click Accept license. Save it to where you need it and that’s how to download an OS. Head back to the main cisco page.
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Step 18. Let’s look at some more of the support features. Click on support in the top navigation pane. Then click on browse all tools. These are some great tools to help you troubleshoot and design. Bugtoolkit, DSP Calculator, RMA, Power calulator, are just a few that I use often. Make sure you review all these tools as you may find some that are very helpful.
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Step 19. Go back to Support and click on “Support Community Forums” Even though I have TAC and account reps in my back pocket, I STILL love to use this forum. It’s awesome. Cisco developers monitor this site, especially on new platforms, and you can often get information back much faster than you would get with a TAC case or through your rep. Just click on a community, like LAN, and post your question. Make sure you thank the poster, mark your question answered, and rate him high.
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Step 20. Go to http://www.google.com. Type in what’s new in Cisco. (I’m sure there’s a way to get here in cisco.com I just havnt tried to find it)
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Step 21. This site is kind of like checking that ‘support’ section under the product like we did with the 4500 except that it’s for all products and only includes new or revised things. I check this each month to see what’s going on. Cisco photography is a great site to get outstanding pictures. Cisco ICON library is great as well. I use the powerepoint ones, even in Visio.
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Step 22. Back to Cisco’s main page. Highlight support and click on “Open a TAC Case” . Here’s how you’ll open a TAC. TAC is the maintenance for Cisco gear. You’ll come here to replace failed hardware, get assistance on configuration (sometimes), and spend 10 to 40 hours until you’re told your software is bugged and get a work around. I’ll admit a few times I’ve screwed up a config and TAC put me in my place. You’ll need a valid serial number that is shown to have maintenance to submit a case.
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Step 23. On Cisco search, type in SRND.
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Step 24. Click on Design Zone.
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Step 25. This is the site that has validated designs. I believe it originated with Call Manager but now applies to most products. You’ll have to spend quite a bit of time reading a single SRND but these are where you can find the hand stamp from Cisco implementing configurations within you environment.
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Step 26. Price your stuff. I used to use the dynamic configuration tool. This would allow you to build your equipment list and verify compatibility (maybe). AS you can see, they are currently shutting this down. I need to find out about this eCommerce web site. I’ve not messed with it at all as of yet.
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That’s how I typically spend my time on Cisco. Once you get the hang of it, then it becomes second nature. I feel that this website is by far the best, beating out HP, Juniper, ALU, Erickson, Huawei, and expecially Niche vendors like Riverbed, Fortinet, or Opnet. As you can see, Cisco does not hide much. Some things that you’ll not find on Cisco are ‘teaching’ materials that delve into those caveats I discussed earlier. If you use a lot of Cisco gear then you’ll want to pull in a Cisco account rep who can provide ‘power points’ on various products. These are NDA documents that have even better information than you can get on the website. (it’s not NDA to say they have NDA is it?) I think I’m safe there.
Below is a cost comparison by list price for HP, Cisco, and Juniper networking gear. I wanted to use ALU as well but their website was so terrible finding products and product info that I was worried about getting eye cancer. In fact it does not even look like ALU even has a branch router that supports 911 any more – all I found were a bunch of missing links. I stuck with the other three because they are what I consider all in one solutions for networking – I can get branch routing, branch switching, data center routing, and data center switching from a single source. I tried to match the vendor solutions as close as possible. I found some surprising results. I used very basic requirements to make this easy to put together.
All list prices were downloaded from the vendor or channel website via a Google search.
After this comparison below I will call out the obvious elephant in the room that industry bloggers are extremely reluctant to discuss in that list price may mean nothing due to possible discounts.
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The Branch and small campus edge router
HP’s MSR50 comes in well below Cisco’s 2900 and Juniper’s 4350. On the face of things these systems all run BGP, OSPF, encryption, legacy TDM, and voice for 911. They are also all upgradable to at least OC3 if needed.
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Data Center and Large Campus Routers
HP comes in, at list, so far below Cisco and HP that I’d almost think these are completely different products. In the end all products support dual full rate OC12, 10GbE, four GbE ports, encryption, MPLS, and can have redundant modules installed. Juniper surprised me here by coming in well above Cisco. I’d also like to state that the documentation available on HP’s website for the 6604 was pretty awful.
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The Campus Access Switch
All systems must stack. All systems must support 802.1af. This is, of course, in addition to the normal stuff like remote management, STP, etc. All systems must support routing for those just in case scenarios and all systems must support 10/100/1000 GbE. Cisco surprises me here in coming in so high with his 3750 platform. HP looks really attractive yet again – even with Major Discounts.
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Data Center Switching
Here I used each vendor’s flagship product. Whether or not they highly exceed my requirements is irrelevant to me. Right now I see data center core switches flush with 10GbE. 40Gb is on the rise and I’ll probably have to adjust soon. In any case, Cisco was not able to get up to 336 ports as it needed an M2 card for OTV. Juniper had plenty of space left and HP needed a bigger chassis because they only had 32 port 10GbE cards (according to the documentation I could find). The transceiver costs astounded me. I’ve always known they were pretty damn expensive but like many other shops, I buy as needed and so this cost never really smacked me in the face like this. HP surprises by coming in way over cost with, my opinion, the worst chassis of the three.
The above pricing may be unfair – most data centers will never need so many uplinks. The vendor’s price may change when you add in the TOR switches. Juniper had to use 40GbE interfaces. I did not include maintenance. Still, was fun to put together.
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Now I’d like to call out the elephant in the room. These prices may not be what companies pay. Check out the below links:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/102512-cisco-csu-263711.html
http://www.bradreese.com/blog/8-1-2011.htm
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These are just a few recent examples showing that each vendor does allows for a discount of their product and that that discount varies. The discount would be based on whatever your companies business management negotiates with the vendor and channel partner. Negotiations may involve things like vendor lock in, size of order, add-ons, and other things I can only guess. Everyone is covered under NDA so what companies pay for network equipment cannot be spoken about – ie whether they get discounts or not and what those discounts are. You have to wait until a story like the above hits the news and then you can start to make guesses whether you think you’re overpaying or not.
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