Campus LAN

When designing a campus network, Cloud Connectiv will always help plan the optimal use of the highly redundant devices. Careful consideration should be given as to when and where to make an investment in redundancy to create a resilient and highly available network. With recent platforms such as the 6880-XL and Catalyst 6800s, Campus LANs have never been this exciting and robust.

Maximizing Business Potential

The hierarchical network model consists of two actively forwarding core nodes, with sufficient bandwidth and capacity to service the entire network in the event of a failure of one of the nodes. Campus LAN still follows the traditional hierarchy of access, aggregation/distribution, and core even in a collapsed model. This model also requires a redundant distribution pair supporting each distribution building block. Similarly to the core, the distribution layer is engineered with sufficient bandwidth and capacity so that the complete failure of one of the distribution nodes does not impact the performance of the network from a bandwidth or switching capacity perspective.

Campus network devices can currently provide a high level of availability within the individual nodes. The Cisco Catalyst 6800/6880 and 4500E switches can support redundant supervisor engines and provide L2 Stateful Switchover (SSO), which ensures that the standby supervisor engine is synchronized from an L2 perspective and can quickly assume L2 forwarding responsibilities in the event of a supervisor failure.

The Catalyst 6800/6880 also provides L3 Non-Stop Forwarding (NSF), which allows the redundant supervisor to assume L3 forwarding responsibilities without resetting or re-establishing neighbor relationships with the surrounding L3 peers in the event of the failure of the primary supervisor.

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Connected Globally, Quickly, Securely

When designing a network for optimum high availability, it is tempting to add redundant supervisors to the redundant topology in an attempt to achieve even higher availability. However, adding redundant supervisors to redundant core and distribution layers of the network can increase the convergence time in the event of a supervisor failure.

Sustaining Your Infrastructure

Network traffic has grown exponentially over the last several years, and this trend is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. By 2016, there will be 19 billion networked devices, up from 10 billion in 2011. Business IP traffic is expected to reach 13.1 exabytes per month in 2016 Networks must be capable of scaling well beyond the needs of today to deal with the traffic of tomorrow while at the same time providing investment protection.

The Cisco® Catalyst® 6880-X Series Switch (Figure 1) is an extensible fixed aggregation switch that delivers a best-in-class Cisco Catalyst 6500 feature set in a small form factor. This premier aggregation platform offers best in-class scalability and flexibility with the premier Cisco Catalyst 6500 feature sets. This 40G/100G-ready platform is ideal for those who want to introduce premium 10G services in small or midsize campus backbones. This unique platform offers 10G port density, full MPLS/VPLS functionality with large table sizes (up to 2M FIB entries), and more than 15 years of best-in-class features. With a full suite of L2/L3, virtualization, security, multicast, IPV6, application visibility, smart operations, and rich media services Cisco Catalyst 6800-X delivers unprecedented capabilities on day one. This platform also runs on the same architecture as the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 2T and therefore offers stability with a proven operating system software.

The Cisco Catalyst 6800-X Series chassis offers integrated resiliency by providing N+1 redundant fans, 1+1 power supply redundancy, and support for virtual switching system (VSS), thereby limiting network downtime, and ensures workforce productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability.

The Cisco Catalyst 6880-X Series offers primary features and benefits, including:

  • • Platform Scalability:The platform supports up to 220Gbps slot capacity per port-card. It supports up to 2Tbps of switching capacity, which doubles up to 4Tbps with VSS technology.
  • • Security:Support for Cisco TrustSec (CTS), to provide IEEE 802.1AE MACsec encryption and role-based ACL, CoPP to prevent DoS attacks and Cisco ISE to safeguard and manage end-to-end security for the enterprise.
  • • Virtualization:Comprehensive suite of Virtualization features including L2/L3 VPN, full MPLS, EVN, VRF aware applications for NAT Netflow, GRE for v4/v6, L2 extensions with VPLS etc. to segment different user groups and serve unique security/QoS policy requirements of each of these diverse user groups.
  • • Application Visibility and Control (AVC):Supports enhanced application monitoring such as Flexible and Sampled NetFlow for intelligent and scalable application monitoring.
  • • Smart Operations:The Cisco Catalyst 6880-X supports Catalyst Instant Access*, which allows an Instant Access Client to act as a remote line card of the Cisco Catalyst 6880-X, as well as Smart Install Director, which provides zero-touch deployment of access switches.
  • • High Availability:Two Cisco Catalyst 6880-X Series Switches can be combined into a VSS. In addition to high-availability VSS, provides ease of operation by providing a single point of management, eliminating the need for First Hop Routing Protocol (FHRP) and removing the reliance on Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for link failure restoration.
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