The Area 0

The innovative architecture of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches simplifies data center transformation by helping to enable a standards-based, high-performance unified fabric. Next-generation data centers increasingly have dense, multi-core, virtual-machine-intensive servers. As the network foundation of Cisco Data Center 3.0 and the latest addition to the family of data-center-class switches, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series can meet these business, service, application, and operational requirements.

With these switches, you can:

• Consolidate the data center and protect investments in existing server, network, storage, and facilities assets
• Decrease the total cost of ownership by simplifying the data center infrastructure
• Increase business agility with easier, faster, and pervasive data center virtualization
• Enhance business resilience with greater operational continuity
• Use existing operational models and administrative domains for easy deployment

The following is the pricing breakdown:

Chassis

Cisco Nexus 5020 Chassis - 40-port 10 GE 2RU switch with 5 Fan Modules
and no power supplies (req SFP+) N5K-C5020P-BF $34,500

Power Supply and Fan Modules

Nexus 5020 1200W AC Power Supply N5K-PAC-1200W(=) $1,500
Nexus 5020 Power Supply Blank N5K-P2-BLNK= $75
Nexus 5020 Fan Module N5K-C5020-FAN= $300

Expansion Modules

N5000 6-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module (req SFP+) N5K-M1600(=) $5,400
N5000 Expansion Module Blank N5K-M1-BLNK= $75

Transceivers and Cables

10GBase SR SFP+ optic SFP-10G-SR(=) $1,795
10GBase Copper SFP+ (Twinax) cable 1 meter SFP-H10GB-CU1M(=) $150
10GBase Copper SFP+ (Twinax) cable 3 meter SFP-H10GB-CU3M(=) $210
10GBase Copper SFP+ (Twinax) cable 5 meter SFP-H10GB-CU5M(=) $260

More information can be found at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9670/index.html

The Cisco CCNA has lost a lot of its value in recent years, mostly due to exam cheating materials such as Testking and Pass4Sure which allow you to download actual copies of the certification exam (complete with solutions) to study from
These are quite common in India, and this page demonstrates this. Thanks for de-valuing my cert, you douchebags

read more | digg story

Check out the IRC conversation I had today. First the guy argues, and then he proves my point completely.

Read more

The Cisco Nexus 7000 is the newest switch to the Cisco family.

From Cisco.com:

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is a modular data center-class switching system designed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks. The Cisco Nexus architecture scales beyond 15 terabits per second, with future availability of 40Gb and 100 Gb Ethernet and unified fabric I/O modules. This new platform is designed for exceptional scalability, continuous systems operation, and transport flexibility.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Platform is powered by Cisco NX-OS, a state-of-the-art operating system. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is purpose-built for the data center and has many unique features and capabilities designed specifically for the most mission-critical place in the network, the data center.

Here is the pricing breakdown for the new Cisco Nexus 7000:

Read more

Today we ran into an issue with our BGP advertisements. To give you a little history, we were allocated 198.49.81.0/24 and 198.49.82.0/24 back in 1993, which was pre-CIDR. (I bet you can see where this is going, already.)

We have been using 198.49.81.0/24 for a number of years, obviously longer then I’ve been at PSU. I was told that we’d never used the “other half” of our assigned IP space. I knew we had two blocks, and earlier this summer I had asked our ISP:

“Should we not be using 198.49.80.0/23?” I did the math a couple times. I checked ipcalc, I knew it was correct. So not realizing that we didn’t own the 198.49.80.0/24 space, we went ahead and advertised 198.49.80.0/23 via BGP. The ISP didn’t catch it, either. A simple mistake.

In the days of CIDR, of course we would be given the /23! It would be just silly not to. In fact, 198.49.80.0/24 is unallocated. It was a simple case of not realizing that the addresses were pre-CIDR, and therefore not contained by a contiguous bit boundary. OOPS.

It wasn’t a big deal to fix it, we simply added the two correct prefixes to our BGP advertisements, and our ISP simply filtered the /23 we were also advertising. There is some more work to be done upstream, I am told, but everything is working as it should at this point.

Props to Cort at KanREN for spotting the issue, and helping us get it resolved.

If there was ever a network tool that I feel every Cisco engineer should have at their disposal, it would be Dynamips. Dynamips is a piece of software that runs as a server on your Unix, Mac or Windows machine. You write text-based configuration files using Dynagen, and it loads up those configurations using an actual IOS image. That’s right - it runs an actual IOS binary on emulated hardware, unlike most simulators out there that only emulate IOS software.

I highly recommend visiting their website, as well as this forum which is an excellent place to get support. You can also read a tutorial for getting started with Dynamips and Dynagen here. Oh, and we’re always around on IRC. Visit #cisco on irc.freenode.net, where you will find me (IPv6Freely) as well as the creator of Dynamips, cfilliot.