A year ago, Cisco announced its entry into gigabit, layer 3 switching for the network core - the Catalyst 8540.
Ever since then, things have been all quiet on the 8540 front. That is, until Cisco announced the Catalyst 6000/6500 line in January, which outperforms the 8540 and prompted competitors like Nortel to proclaim the 8540 dead.
In an effort to quell confusion on the Catalyst front and show that its core offering is alive and well, Cisco is starting to reveal some 8540 users and shipment numbers.
"We do have a number of users," says Marthin DeBeer, director of product marketing at Cisco. "We've shipped more than 400 (in February alone)."
The 8540 has been shipping since November. Gigabit Ethernet ports for the switch began shipping in December. DeBeer says the ramp has been slow on the 8540 because it's sold to customers with huge networks that take their time in evaluating products.
"People tend to take three months" to evaluate the product, DeBeer says. "It's now ramping in much more volume."
With regard to the positioning of the8540 vs. the 6000/6500 line, DeBeer says the 6000/6500s will be deployed as high-density aggregation and distribution switches between workgroups and the 8540 in the network core. The 8540 will be just that - a network core switch for high-performance routing.
Nortel claims the emergence of the 6000/6500 line, due to its density and switching capacity, obsoletes the 8540. They claim Cisco's configuration of a distribution/aggregation switching layer in between workgroups and the network core is a smokescreen to disguise the demise of the 8540. They say the dearth of 8540 users underscores Cisco's deemphasis of the switch.
Nonsense, Cisco says.
"We have numerous customers with campuses in excess of 30,000 nodes," DeBeer says, adding that Cisco's competitors generally do not build networks in excess of 10,000 nodes. "Once you go to a campus of that size you cannot just have one box that fits everywhere."
Catalyst 8540 users include Fermi National Labs, Sandia National Labs, PeopleSoft, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. The users are in differing stages of deployment.
Fermi is deploying a single 8540 as the core of a 75 to 100 node gigabit computing farm network, says Phil Demar, group leader for networking at Fermi.
"It tends to be pretty much vanilla IP and file transfers," he says.
Fermi has had the 8540 in production for a few weeks, Demar says. Fermi's also sizing up Cisco's new Catalyst 6500 line for future requirements that may have warranted another 8540.
But first, Cisco needs to improve the routing performance of the 6500 in order for it to knock out the 8540, Demar says.
"The existing routing blade simply doesn't do it, it isn't sufficient for anything like (interactive computing farms)," he says. "But if they put a routing blade in for that, certainly the switch fabric is sufficient capacity to do that. The (Multilayer Switch Module) for the 6500 has very low throughput and it's something we're frankly not interested in."
The routing module in the 8540, meanwhile, does not provide the full function routing of a Cisco 7500 router, Demar says. But for interactive computing farms it's "perfectly acceptable," he says.
PeopleSoft is currently putting the two 8540s through the paces for production deployment in August. The company sees a clear delineation between the 8540 and the Catalyst 6500.
"The 6500s we see a lot more as a classic server farm where you do need the densities of higher throughput equipment," says Stan Christensen, senior network engineer at PeopleSoft. "We're looking to the 8540 as being a better core backbone switch" to replace a Cisco 7513 router. "It will become a focal point for routing for us," he says.
Sandia National Labs has taken delivery of the 8540 but has not set it up for testing or production use yet, says Frank Belicki, a network manager at the labs.
"Haven't even plugged it in yet," he says. "For right now it's just a piece of lab gear that we bought to find the functionality and eventually migrate it into production."
HP and Motorola did not return phone calls.
