4500 Chassis - is it completely passive?

[ebassi]

My question is a simple question ... I believe, but I can't find an answer.

Is the 4500 chassis completely passive or are there inside it any active component?

This question is in order to decide right redundancy and provisioning spare part policy.

Thanks

Enrico

[jphilope]

Enrico,

Completely passive in the meaning of no processing components? Yes, it is passive in that respect. Completely passive in the meaning of just traces and connectors? No.

There are electronic components on it. We found this out the hard way as appearently a capacitor on the backplane board shorted out and caught fire in our core 4507 at our old Data Center. Cisco had the serial number listed as a 2950, and it was fun getting it replaced. It took out both Sup IVs, and an interface card with actual fire damage. We were lucky the fire supression system was not activated, as in this facility it is water (dry charge).

We had a physical standby to replace this and we lost only a single hour on a Saturday Evening in an unmanned facility. If you have a critical point of failure, a cold spare would be advisable, to include the chassis.

HTH,

Jim

P.S. We have pictures....

[jcoke]

In the R chassis family there are "splitters" (formally fabric-redundancy modules) for each line card on the backplane.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps4324/products_data_sheet0900aecd801792b1.html

AFAIK the FRMs are not a spare part that you can keep on hand.