Cliff Bowles <Cliff.Bowles@apollo.edu> writes:
We have some aging infrastructure and need to start budgeting next-gen.
* The network has several small routers as individual edges to peers, WAN, SIP services.
* It has a couple 6509s as Internet edge (full tables, 2 carriers, no transit, simple policies)
* It has some Nexus 7K as an aggregation layer for all the server pods
* It has some 6509s as a backbone to interconnect the aggregation layers and inter-site links.
* We do run VRFs/MPLS across our backbone with L3, L2 and L1 services. Nothing super fancy, but it's a requirement.
You could always roll the 6509s into 6800 series stuff if you're married to Cisco for Campus style switches in your distribution network. But I really hate the Sup2T. In my admittedly limited scope, they have a pretty high failure rate. If you want something simple that still supports MPLS and VPLS, you can't really beat Brocade for port density. I getting ready to rip out 6 sets of 6509s and replace them with 16 slot MLXe chasis. And if I were in your shoes I'd be looking at either ASR9K or Juniper MX series stuff to replace the 6509s that you have on your edge. I can't speak much for the server-facing stuff on your network though. -Daniel