c-7000 Blade System Enclosure with CAT Blade Switch 3020

[Akhtars]

Dear all,

I was planning to replace c-7000 Enclosure Pass-throughs with Catalyst Blade Switch 3020s. But I can't justify management regrading throughput of uplink from 3020 Blade switch which is just 6 Gig as compared to 16Gig(of one pass through)..... Can anyone help me out in this..


Regards,

Akhtar

[HEM_2]

Akhtar:

the only justification I can provide is:

sure the pass-through modules are non-blocking meaning all the NIC's potential bandwidth can reach external to the enclosure. However, what are you connecting the pass-through ports to? If they are connecting to a switch that has less than a 6Gbps uplink to the rest of the infrastructure then you are still constrained.

There are not many completely non-blocking environments out there.

That being said, there are advantages and disadvantages of a pass-through vs Cisco 3020 solution.

hope this helps.

[Phillip Thayer]

Here are some of the advantages you get with the Cisco Cat Blade 3020:

- Communication between blades is still done at wire speed at 1GB/sec.
- Ability to communicate externally to the network at 1GB/sec on 8 10/100/1000Base-T connections that can be configured with failover capability OR 4 10/100/1000 SX SFP based ports.
- CiscoWorks Software that includes multilayer feature configurations such as routing protocols, ACLs, and QoS parameters.
- IOS CLI support providing a common user interface and command set with all Cisco routers and Cisco Catalyst desktop switches.
- The Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 supports an embedded Remote Monitoring (RMON) software agent for enhanced traffic management, monitoring and analysis.
- VLAN - Virtual Local Area Network is a logical network topology configured on top of a physical network topology which conserves bandwidth and improves security by limiting traffic to specific groups of devices.
- Supports Cisco's Identity-Based Networking Services (IBNS) which prevents unauthorized network access and insures that users get only their designated privileges.
- Compatible with Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS) so that user security profiles and authentication follow the user regardless of where they connect on the network.
- Access Control Lists (ACL's) are maintained in hardware for maximum performance and can be used to guard against denial-of-service and other attacks.

If you want this in a much better format than this go to http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/catalyst/benefits.html and you can see where I got all this information from. All the justification you will need is there for you.

Phil