We have a small campus with a main building and a few prefabbed buildings, a microwave building that connects our various WAN sites, and redundant Internet connections. In the past we used two 4006 w/sup3, L2 port channel in between, and HSRP as our collapsed core, and more than a dozen of 3550 & 3524XL & 2950. It worked great for a few years. Due to network growth and 3-4 network outages in recent years that happened roughly once every 6-7 months caused by misbehaving sup3, accidentally introduced switching loops/misconfigured STP, etc. We decided to shut down one of the core switches and use it as a manual standby in case of core failures.
Now we are planning to move to new campus with similar layout as the old one, supporting about 250 users and 40 servers (VMs and physical). We wonder if we should go back to the original collapsed core model with two cores, or, just building a single core with enough redundancy built-in. Being a SMB, we are extremely cost-conscious. That was why we never did any upgrade for 10 years. Now that there is a chance, we'd like to do it as cost-effective as possible. Performance is not a big concern as we never really have problem with our current 100mbps to desktops and 1gbps for uplinks and ether-teamed Gbps servers setup. We do, however, plan to do 1Gb to desktops and probably10Gb between access and distribution/core. Here are my questions:
Can we save money by using one 6500 chasis with redundant sup engines and possibly redundant line cards on important switch and server connections while still achieving virtually the same redudancy at the core as the dual core model? How practically reliable is one chasis? Information I got from various vendor engineers is that no one has ever seen a failed chasis.
If not, can we do redundant chasis (or backplanes) in one physical box? Is the cost then equivalent to the dual core setup?
Please advise at your earliest convenince. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!
