Inline power Catalyst 4006 compared to the Cat3524PWR

[Tom Dillon]

I am just curious what other folks think about using the 4006 in the wiring closet for inline powered ports. I have four of the Cat4006 without the power shelf and with the standard 48 port modules. The 4006's have been less than desirable for reliability and using the chassis with (5) 48 port modules is a lot of phones to go dead if the sup dies.

I am thinking that the Catalyst 3524PWR's are the better way to go. This reduces the failure to only 24 ports verses 240 ports on the Cat4006.

Also, we have been stacking up to 8 3524's in one stack. Cisco's documents 9 switches can be stacked. Stacks of 8 have been working for us. Does anyone stack 9 or more?

Thanks,

Tom.

[ltropiano]

We have both, 3524PWRs and 4006s with inline power blades. It seems like the break even point between ports on solutions is 96 or more ports you get a better price on the 4006. We also have the 4604GWY card which handles the transcoding/conferencing. The gotcha with the 4xxx series is the PEM and power shelf that you need to buy, which seems to add an exhorbitant pricetag to the solution. You can put redundant SUP engines, but still adds more $.

I like the stackable 3524s, but you can also loose connectivity if one of the switches in the middle dies too...

[Tom Dillon]

I am thinking that the 4006's are a poorly designed switch for VoIP. The gateways are very odd, the addon power is even odder. I am not too sure you can have a second SUP. I was told it was on Cisco's road map. If it is available, hopefully they sell the 2nd SUP at half price, like they do with the 6500s.

On stacking the 3524s, you can keep all the switchs connected if the middle switch dies. We dual home the stack to a pair of 6500s and let spanning tree block the redundant path. If you have layer 3 separating the redundant connections, then you have the problem with half the stack losing connectivity. Spanning tree was not our first choice, but we didn't want to loose any more than 24 phones if a switch died or we did not want to dual home each switch to the 6500's. This is one of the reasons to use a chassis instead of the stackables. We considered 6500s in the closets, but it got real expensive.

Anyway thanks for your thoughts.

[mtashiro]

I would not recommend, nor does TAC, stacking more than two 3524s for voice. There are issues with QoS when this occurs.

[Tom Dillon]

Thanks for the reply. I believe the QoS issues are with the Gigastack GBIC. They are a shared device and when you have more than two 3524s the links are half duplex. We are using the WS-G5484,1000BASE-SX GBIC, which provide a full duplex connection between the 3524's and QoS is suppose to be supported. Where you referring to the Gigastack GBIC's?