ME 3400 in Enterprise LAN - ?

[ELENA OKULOVA]

Hello,

There is a quite interesting in value-for-money perspective model ME 3400

(see http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6580/products_data_sheet0900aecd8034fef3.html)

Cisco ME 3400G-12CS AC with 12 dual-purpose (10/100/1000 and Small Form-Factor Pluggable [SFP]) ports, four SFP uplinks, and two fixed redundant AC power supplies (part number ME-3400G-12CS-A)

which costs less than 3750G with 12 SFP slots and no redundant Power supply nor copper GigEth ports.

I am designing LAN for an enterprise customer with around 10 aggregation switches. In the core will be two Catalyst 6513.

As aggregation - either some 3750G, 3560G or these ME3400 - which are a lot more flexible.

I've checked, and such enterprise LAN Network Mgmt software as CiscoWorks LMS 3.0 supports them.

Where is the catch - it seems that Cisco does not recommend ME3400 for Enterprise LAN - or what? We have not had any experiense with ME3400. Please Help.

[andrew.burns]

Hi,

The catch is that it doesn't run standard "enterprise lan" software - it runs software customised for the service provider environment. It might be possible to make it work in the enterprise but I sure wouldn't recommend it.

The ME switches have a different interface configuration - all ports must be UNI or NNI and different protocols are not necessarily supported on both port types. Make sure you completely understand the difference! Also, there are two types of UNI VLAN among other differences and a lot of unsupported "normal" IOS commands.

HTH

Andrew.