Networking Advice Please :)

Hi

I'm looking at some advice for upgrading our core networking. It's been about 5 years since I've done this sort of thing.

Following on from my post the other day, I've done a lot of looking around at other posts and I decided to re-do my post as the other was poorly explained (by me).

Currently we have an HP MSA SAN connected to 3 VMWare hosts using an Aruba 3810 16 Port SFP Switch. We have multipathing enabled but this is just two vlans on the same switch. Currently using DAC cables.

For inter-host communication, vmotion and communication with the rest of the network we have an HP Office connect 24 1Gig copper switch.

Two problem I want to address:

a) no redundancy on either.

b) the office connect switch is a massive bottleneck.

Our vendor is pushing us down the converged networking route using two Meraki MS425-16 switches at a cost of about £15000 ($18500)

I don't like this idea and would like to keep the iscsi switches separate (having redundant iscsci switches seems to be the prevailing logic). I'm thinking of going down the refurb route to get better value (Something like cisco refresh) and was looking at getting a pair of either:

• Cisco Nexus N9K-C9372PX
• Arista 7150
• Arista 7050SX2

I also looked at the Nexus 3k series but not sure if they are worth looking at over the 9k. Will any of those switches have problems using DAC cables? I want to expand on the 16 ports we currently have as I plan to add backup storage, a second SAN and another host later next year.

Now when we get to replacing the Office Connect i'm not too sure. My requirements are:

• 24-48 Port SFP
• 10Gig Support
• No copper requirement
• Redundancy

We are buying a new Fortigate 100F firewall which has 2 10Gig SFP+ links so I was planning on doing all intervlan routing on that. Could I just buy another pair of Nexus 9K's or is there a better option? I've looked at some whitebox switches that look fairly good value.

Any input would be most appreciated :)