Hi there,

It depends on how much traffic you think you will have going through the switches.

The 6500 has a far superior backplane architecture to the 4500 making it much, much faster. It also has the capability to run distributed CEF where it will put the mac and cef tables on the line cards to save them asking the supervisor every time a decision is needed. The 4500 does not have such a feature and every packet that comes in is sent up to the supervisor for processing. Which brings me back to the comment about traffic.

I use 4500's mainly in the access layer and only then use 6 x gbic cards. This is because the backplane link to the supervisor is only 6 gig and on a shared bus, but that could be more than enough for the throughput that you need. The 6500 has a clever crossbar architecture as well as a shared bus and will depend on the cards that you buy as to what it uses.

If you've got the budget - go for a 6500. It'll provide much better future proofing too.

Hope that helps,

LH

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