Getting intimate with some 6509 switches :)

Well it had to happen - I finally got my hands on some real expensive kit! Allow me to show you:


The kit arrived on pallates, lots of them! And blimey they're huge!





After we finally shifted through all of the boxes we were left with 4 beasts (3 pictured):





Once we had all of the components unwrapped we started to assemble the chassis. I didn't include any pics of the dual 6000W PSUs (Hot swappable, dual input, essentially made up of two 3000W PSU's internally) because they were quite boring. The box can be powered up from a single input on a single PSU. The below Sup720 with 10Gigabit Fiber however, is definitely not boring:

The Sup720 is made up of a a PFC and MSFC for both forwarding and routing engines. All intelligence of the chassis is run from here, and the box won't boot without it installed. The box also won't boot without a fan tray:

The Sup720 can only be installed in slots 5 or 6 of the 6509 switch. Notice from the pic below that the backplane for slots 5 and 6 is wider than all the others. Slots 1 and 2 buses are wider too (apparently for when Sup cards used to reside in these slots) however no advantage can be gained by installing any cards in these slots.

In the other two slots we installed some new 48port Gigabit line cards and 24port SFP Gigabit line cards. Each SFP card had 14 Fiber SFP's installed in it. We had both cards set up with a DSFC which means that they are able to make their own decisions (instead of using the PFC on the Sup720). Which ultimately means less pressure on the Sup card.

Fully loaded baby! Time to play!