I need some advice/insight from the group.
Currently we have 5000's and 5500's in the closets coming back ATM to the
core which consists of LS1010's running LANE.   We'd like to try and
position ourselves for an easy transition to Gigabit, so we are looking at
what we can do now.

For instance, we have a ongoing project of collapsing collision domains and
making everything switched to the desktop, so new switches are needed.  We
are looking at the 4000's series due to the fact that it makes a nice fit
into the gigabit backbone solution.  BUT it does not do LANE.  If we keep
buying Cat5000's then we are just digging ourselves deeper into ATM
land....we don't want to do that.   

So, a thought was what about getting gig ports in the 5500's (SupIII's) and
collapsing the backbone to a Cat6000 switch? That works well for the 5500's
and we can do that along side our ATM backbone currently...but what about
all the 5K's we have in all the closets in the other 2 buildings?  One
thought was fast EtherChannel...which we could take 2 ports and be at 200MB
which would be more than enough bandwidth to connect the floors to the
backbone.  That brings up another problem though....how do we now get
multiple VLANs across switches if we are ethernet attached and LANE isn't
doing it for us.  That's where ISL trunking comes in handy of course....and
that is a simple solution and it sounds almost too easy........probably
because it is.  Doing some reading I found that they do not advise running
LANE along side of ISL trunking due to possible problems w/ Spanning Tree
and all kinds of other good stuff.

So, here's where this group comes in:  
Advice on ISL trunking along side LANE ... keep in mind I'd be trying this
w/ our production backbone and wouldn't want to just "test it out".
Any other design suggestions that we can work into the budget now?  If we
had the money now...we'd like to have 2 6500's as the core and 4000's in all
the closets, but we can't just replace everything at once.  Which is why I'm
trying to develop a parallel solution and backbone rollover would just we a
matter of turning off ATM.

You're help would be greatly appreciated.

Patrick Kirk
Network Engineer
Vision Service Plan
http://www.vsp.com



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