Anybody here work on a big-lan?

[Red 6]

Just cause I make six figures doesn't mean I'm clueless. I keep rescheduling the lobotomy!

Sroylance, If they have changed minds again do you have a link to their latest thoughts on this subject as I'm curious. In the CCNP testing, the book/course wasn't pushing the 6500's to the access-layer. They were recommending 2900's as a access-layer closet switch and 5000's as a large access-layer closet switch. The 6500 was reserved for core/distribution layer depending on size of network.

[sroylance]

Red 6:
My understanding is second-hand since I'm not on the design group, but we are an NSA and I'm pretty sure that's where it came form. If you search CCO for 'campus network design' you can see a real emphasis on layer-3 redundancy with HSRP and less on STP and large layer-2 implementations.

2900's SUCK ASS, and I hope noone from Cisco would deny it. I think the access layer recommendations are mostly Cat 4k's. In a fit of abject stupidity Cisco has also decided to sell a '2980', which contrary to what you might think is NOT based on the crappy 2900 series, but is rather a fixed configuration Cat 4k based switch.

<rant>
Yay for clearly named product lines! It really makes it easy to figure out what kind of part youre dealing with when the underlying architecture changes, but the number stays the same!
</rant>

I wouldn't be surprised if Cat 5K's get squeezed out by more featureful 6500's at the top end and cheaper, faster 4K's at the low.

PS:
I spent the last 5 minutes trying to sort the various product line out on CCO, and it is completely f__ing confusing. Its even worse if you do SNMP management...
IOS based switches use the CISCO-2900 MIB, CatOS switches use the CISCO-STACK MIB. 3500 and 3550's run switch IOS, so they use the 2900 MIB even though they aren't 2900's. The _CATALYST_ 2900 (Not Cisco 2900XL) series, however, run CatOS and use the STACK MIB.

[Red 6]

My Cisco rep was saying the Cat 5000s are about six-eight months from being announced EOL. He says Cisco is pushing the 4006 or 6505 in the 5000's place. The official line in the certification tracks is still the 2900's for the most part. They still talk about the "switch stack". Personally I'll never use a 2900 for an access layer switch. To be honest we use 6509's cause we need the port density and don't want to have to daisy chain smaller switches. Centralized wiring closets are good.

I won't comment on their product lines or MIBs. Just know I feel your pain.

BTW what is NSA, I work in a NAS, Network Architecture and Security, but I'm not sure of the NSA term unless you mean .gov

[sroylance]

Sorry, NSA is a Cisco acronym for 'Network Supported Account'. We get a dedicated technical guy to throw question at and work with on design.

6509's are good, but sooo expensive, cost-per-port is a lot lower on the 4000's. The new Sup, I think sup-3, and layer-3 card for the 4000 give it a 64 Gbps backplane and ridiculous packets-per-second, it just lacks all the QoS and ACL ASIC's the 6500 has.

[HowardDrake]

Well, if you count all the machines that all my clients use as one big network, and it's not inconceivable since most of them to link to each other in some ways, I've got almost 60 nodes on a network, not counting the 11 node network I have in my home right now.
Darn thing is, that even my relatively small network has lots of the goodies that larger networks use. 802.11b connectivity? Got it. VPN? Got it. Web and FTP services? Have them. Macs and PCs and Linux and Palms? Oh yes, cross platfrom is here. Is this a big LAN or small WAN? Well my clients span almost 300 miles, you decide .