Hi

We got the go ahead to run fibre to pretty much most of our switches and get rid of this cascaded switch crap thats going on.

We've decided to go for a collapsed backbone - ie all our servers hook straight into the core switch, and then a gigabit fibre runs from the core to each satellite switch.

But I'm wondering what sort of fibre switch/core you guys can recommend. I've been toying around with the idea of a cisco 4506 - the chassis itself is quite cheap but the switch blades not so. The HP kit looks quite good and seems to get a lot of recommendations so what do you think I should be looking at? The core will be switching fibre only. In the long term I need something that can scale as the network grows so a chassis/blade product would be ideal. I might have to settle for a decent fibre switch in the short run though.