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New Cisco Network - Design issues

tmalavetas
Level 1
Level 1

Hi everybody,

I am designing a new Cisco network from scratch for a customer of mine, and I have a few questions.

At the moment they have a totally flat network based on a single switch where everybody sits in one VLAN... users, servers, developers, everybody!

They have approximately 600 users (10/100 links), and they also need to accommodate 64 servers with dual NICs (1 Gbps links).

My initial thought was to use 14x 2960's (48-port) on the edge with redundant connections to the core, and two 6504's in the core. These two would have a single SUP720 and two 48-port 10/100/1000 each, to accommodate the connections to the 2960's AND the servers (the servers would have one connection to each core switch).

My problem is that the customer has a low budget, and probably he cannot afford the 6504's. I should therefore come up with a second option.

This second option would be to use 4x 3750E's in the core (2 stacks of two), OR even 2 stacks of 3560E's! They both provide 32Gbps backplane and I reckon it should not pose a problem.

I have never come across though network of 600 users and 64 servers being based on a 3560's core!

Would they take the traffic?

(Most of the traffic is file transfers, with a very small percentage being streaming traffic. In addition, most of the traffic would be between the user VLANs and the server VLANs (I was thinking of two server VLANs, one through one core stack, and one through the other)

Would something like that work?

TIA

Theo

4 Replies 4

Collin Clark
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Those SUP720's are expensive! Check out the Catalyst 4948, they have a 96Gbps backplane. I have a number of SMB clients using those switches as the core and I use them at the server farm distro level.

mhurley131
Level 4
Level 4

What about 4500s instead of 6500s? That should save you quite a bit of money and the 4500s should be able to handle the amount of traffic 600 users will push through it.

saxon.jones
Level 1
Level 1

At a previous job we sustained about 150Mbps of Internet customers' traffic through a 3550-24-EMI, and on a few brief occassions another 100-200Mbps of collocation traffic when peoples' hosts got infected and it never buckled under the load.

The 3550, 3560, and 3570 has always seemed to me to be limited primarily by route table size rather than bandwidth or packet rates.

Also note that 3560E's don't "stack" though you can use the 10GE ports to achieve a similar effect.

I'd be interested in how this turned out, and what options you pursued (since your post was 6 months ago now) as I'm in the motions of recommending a very similar design.

ccbootcamp
Level 7
Level 7

Are all of the cabling runs home-runs? If not, how many wiring closets? If there are closets, what's the physical uplink from the closets? Have you done any type of traffic analysis? Can you divide up the users and VLANs for resource (aka server) allocation?

Lot of questions here to determine the best/most cost effective solution.

-brad

www.ccbootcamp.com

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