Why I love Cisco 4507 / Cisco 4510 network switches.

TechGromit

Uptime uptime is 3 years, 32 weeks, 1 day, 3 hours, 21 minutes. Beat that!

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JDMurray

Have you applied any firmware updates in that time?

TechGromit

Firmware no, ISO updates yes. It has two controllers, (eight cards slots, two controllers cards, six 48 port Ethernet cards). You can upgrade one and fail over when rebooting each one. I can upgrade the network switch that would normally affect hundreds of users in the middle of the day if I wanted to, without any network connectivity loss. I have 4 of these monsters, the others are switch stacks, when a stack is rebooted, its a good 15 to 20 minute outage each. They account for about a 1/3 of the user base. I wish I had more, for a 24/7 operation, it's a real pain to get departments to agree to outages.

JDMurray

TechGromit said:

for a 24/7 operation, it's a real pain to get departments to agree to outages.

I work for a global company that operates 24/7/365 and has multiple change controls every day--some of which cause planned outages with failover events. Our corporate culture regards the ability to handle service-impacting events as a necessity. The necessity of such is a great opportunity for the network architects to plan for the redundancy needed to survive equipment failure, negligence, and natural disasters. Your business should give it a try!

TechGromit

The network as a whole has redundancy built into it, but at the end of the line, each PC only has one NIC card in it, single point of failure when a switch is down. Most PC's also have built in wireless, so in theory they can fail over to wireless, but generally the Access Points's are on the same switch as the users. We get a lot of support from upper IT management in general, but local non-IT management not so much. We have managers complaining to us there Cell Phone coverage / performance is crappy, like the Cell towers are our problem. We do repeat the signal within the buildings, but at the end of the day it's not our system to control/tweak.