Overview of the new Cisco Fatalyst line of switches

The new series of switches from one of the largest vendors - Cisco Systems has just been announced.

In addition to the Nexus and Catalyst product lines, the new Cisco Fatalyst product line will be released and, accordingly, the approach to building local area networks will be revised. The Borderless Networks concept is being replaced by the new Hopeless Networks concept , the main support in it is on L2, L3 and lvl80 Fatalyst switches.




Especially for those to whom tl; dr, at the end of the article the conditions for obtaining two switches for temporary testing are described.

So, what's interesting in the new switches from Cisco:
  1. The complete set of all models is fixed, it cannot be changed in any way (even SFP). In the future, a line of modular switches may appear, but even there, most likely the modules will be rigidly fixed in the slots.
  2. The new design is black ( gravely black ) in combination with a case made of a special alloy (" doom metal "). The model Fatalyst EMO case is waterproof, with pink inserts.
  3. Noticeable improvements in IPv6 routing and support (see below).
  4. Great for networking in the Internet of Things with Sustainable Cloud SDN of Everything .


A little more about routing. A number of improvements are announced, which allowed to achieve a performance of more than 9000 Gbit / s when routing to Null0.

By default, switches with routing support do this based on their destination (so-called destiny-based routing ). It is also possible to use PBR ( prophecy-based routing ).

Improvements also affected routing protocols. Those who study EIGRP remember that one of the “chips” of the protocol is the DUAL algorithm and the operation of the Finite State Machine. Cisco engineers went further and improved the algorithms through the use of the so-called Only-State Predeterministic Final State Machine(finished predefined automaton with a single state). The circuit diagram of the machine is shown in the figure below:



Such an automaton allows you to get stable routes without loops for loopback interfaces. For backward compatibility, the NOHOPE (No Overhead over Plain EIGRP) standard is used .

Changes in IPv6 affected primarily the SLAAC algorithm (aka Stateless address configuration). This approach has a number of weaknesses, such as confusion and possible problems due to constantly changing temporary addresses. On Fatalyst switches, the SLAAC mechanism has been replaced by HLAAC ( Hopeless autoconfiguration ) with support for SAD ( Spontaneous address detection) A new way to obtain addresses ensures that regardless of the situation and settings, the switch will always receive the same predefined address. In addition, due to SAD, the assignment of any other ("spontaneous") addresses to any interfaces is excluded.

Other improvements include support for PPP ( Pointless-to-pointless protocol ) and the ability to enable depression instead of compression on interfaces.

And finally, the most significant change lies in the way you work with the device configuration.

First, switches will come to customers already configured. This decision is intended to improve the situation with the deployment of systems, especially in conditions of a shortage of qualified personnel. Now the device will be configured already “out of the box”, and there is absolutely nothing to do.

Secondly, Cisco studies showed that a very large proportion of failures and downtime were not at all the conscience of the failed equipment, but the conscience of network engineers who changed the correct settings to erroneous, that is, human factors (Have you configured the logging of the entered commands?). For this reason, the configuration on Cisco Fatalyst cannot be changed. No way. It is predetermined.

Of particular note is the fact that Cisco has promised to publish hopeless software in the near future.

How to get a pair of Cisco Fatalyst switches for testing


If you are interested in this, you need to write an essay in PM in which to cover two topics:
1) How Cisco Fatalyst switches and the Hopeless Networks concept will not change the world, and
2) Why do you want to get them for testing (note that, to for example, “beautiful” and “yes, for fun” are not valid reasons).

We reserve the right to publish the essays we like at the end of this article.

In preparation, the information from the datasheet was used ( link )
Thanks for the idea of ​​the post evilenka!

PS
Happy April, 1!

Also popular now: