[c-nsp] in praise of the cat6500 Re: Flow tools

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday, January 23, 2012 03:30:14 PM Jeff Bacon wrote:
...
> The Cat6k got its start as an L2 device. It was that until some
> bright boy decided to gut a 7200 NPE and glue it into the supervisor
> and create the MSFC.
...
> Just another $0.02 in the pot.

:-)

The Cat6k got its start as the Cat5k.  The MSFC got its start as the RSFC for the Cat5k SupIIG (and later IIIG).  Cat5k/SupIIIG+RSFC = something like Cat6k w/MSFC in hybrid mode with CatOS on the supervisor.  (Source: Kennedy Clark's 'Cisco LAN Switching' from a long time ago plus my own experiences with currently running in production Cat5k hardware).  The hardware is still doing what it needs to be doing, and doing it in this role more than adequately.  And the RFI to our radiotelescopes has proven to be less than the RFI of our two 7609's.

Anybody remember the MSM? :-)  And I still have Cat5k's in production running RSM blades (RSM = 7500's RSP2 with a special interface to the Catalyst bus) and RSFC piggy's.  (MSM = Catalyst 8510 SRP++, with bus interfacing, sort of).

The Catalyst 5000 Supervisor Engine I had its EARL, long ago.  I don't know where in Crescendo's history EARL got its start, but I would find that to be interesting reading.