[c-nsp] nexus 5548 versus C4900M

[Andrew Miehs]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Holemans Wim <wim.holemans at ua.ac.be> wrote:

> Now I have to create a new, similar  service cluster. The first idea was
> to copy the setup but as we are also looking at Nexus for our datacenter, I
> noticed the Nexus 5548UP. This gives you out-of-the-box 32 1G/10G ports and
> costs (based on the prices I have seen) 25% less than the above C4900M
> configuration.
> Anyone has a reason why we should stick to the C4900M (or maybe similar
> C4500 solution) and not put a Nexus in place, apart from the obvious
> differences between IOS and NXOS for management ?
> I think, when adding the L3 card to the Nexus, the 25% price difference
> will disappear but are there any limits you see (arp table, mac address
> table size, buffering, IPv6 support..) that would take the Nexus out of the
> picture ?
>

N5K has a limit of effectively 25K MAC addresses.

If you are even remotely thinking of using L3 go for an N7K, 6500 or 4500.

Andrew