My company is upgrading our whole infrastructure. We currently have 2 quotes for vendors but they didn't suggest making any changes to the topology, just the equipment. I believe we can combine some of these switches and lower our switch count. There are some switches in the rack with 1 connection.
Topology- Ring. We have a Cisco 4510R+E in our core area. The core has SVI default gateways for each network. It goes to our firewall where all the routing is done.
From the core, There is a ring connection from left to right, with 1gb SMF connections. There are a total of 10 distro racks, each rack consisting of 3 IE-4010 switches. When they first designed, they put 3 switches in each rack and 3 separate networks segmented by each switch. One of these "ring" connections are very low bandwidth. I believe we can combine them all into 1/2 switches in each rack.
Instead of 10 connections in a ring, would it be better to break it down into 4 racks and cross-connect them all for redundancy? They put REP on the ring, which is great whenever there's a failure, but there are multiple access switches who think they are the root bridges for STP. I'm also wondering if it would be better to just turn off STP on the access switches.
Based on this description, what would you suggest for upgrading my network? I feel like having 3 switches in 10 racks (30) is overboard considering utilization is under 5% on some of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment