Michael, I suggest you take a look here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9441/Products_Sub_Category_Home.ht ml
Basically the whole Nexus family is running a different OS (NX-OS) which is based on the MDS storage OS line. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9372/index.html There are a few differences between Catalyst switches and Nexus switches. For example, Nexus supports vPC, which means that you have a multi-chassis EtherChannel trunk from a pair of Nexus 5000/7000 distribution switches to any EtherChannel enabled access switch. This basically doubles the Access->Distribution bandwidth as you have no links blocked by Spanning Tree. Another major difference is the integration of Nexus 2000 Fabric Extenders with Nexus 5000 switches. The Nexus 2000 switches basically act as remote (over 10Gig fiber) "linecards" of the Nexus 5000. This allows deploying top of the rack switches without the additional management overhead: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10110/index.html Hope this helps. Arie -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Malitsky Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 00:12 To: [email protected] Subject: [c-nsp] Catalyst vs. Nexus Hello, I am working on the first 10Gig deployment in a small data center. Main driver is a SQL database, so there will be a bunch of SQL servers virtualized using VMware, running against a SAN over iSCSI. I've done some research and it looks like I can build the network using a Catalyst 4900M or a Nexus 5010, at about the same cost. I am familiar with the Catalyst family, but have no experience with the Nexus. At this point, the only major difference I see is that Nexus supports Fibre Channel (which I don't need). For being different product families, I am having a hard time understanding what the major differences are. Can anyone enlighten me? If anyone has hands-on experience with both and willing to share, that would be most appreciated. Thanks, Michael Malitsky _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
