Looking for a good core type switch for a colo rack

[Keith9]

I'm looking for a good core-type switch for a colo rack which will house things like servers, VPN devices, Internet handoffs, etc..

The uplink to the rest of our private wan would be a 10 gig private fiber ring.  The vendor terminates the ring in their ADVA handoff switch so they see and manage both ends of the ring, and give us one link.

A backup may be an IPSEC tunnel through a palo alto firewall over the internet.

Right now we are building out a X590 stack, 24 port copper, 24 port SFP+, and I have the 40G ports partitioned into 4 ports each with breakout cables.  This is for a DR colo.... just waiting for my second core licence key from my reseller so the stack license mismatch goes away.

In our HQ we have 4 X690s at our core.  1 48 port copper and 1 48 port SFP+ is one core, and we have the same for another core.  They run VRRP and we do MLAG between these stacks.  I want to do simular but we bought these X690s back in 2017, so I just want to size and get the best bang for the buck for a new colo.  The plan is eventually to move our primary server infrastructure at our HQ to a colo facility (one that manages power, cooling, and security like a pro).  But all our WAN and branch connections still will come into our main office for quite some time so we are not moving the X690's.  They aggregate other access stacks throughout the building anyway (5520's).

So to build new in a colo rack or two that's just servers, whats a good quality core switch that can go OSFP, BGP, MLAGs, etc.  Perhaps I could use two 48 port SFP+ switches and populate them with copper SFP's, 1gig SFPs and 10gig SFP+ where needed?  I know the X590 seems to work great with all of those types of SFP's.  Our X690s didn't link up with copper SFP's in them when I tried back in 2017, so I'm not sure if that's a restriction or a firmware limitation (the x590 is new so its up to date).

For storage / iscsi we would probably just move our VM infrastructure over a weekend along with our Aristaa dcs-7280sr-48c6-f pair and continue to keep all storage traffic on separate iron vs data traffic.

We are familiar with EXOS so I'd prefer that, but I'm open to suggestions.

The colo would probably have its own networks.  Its going to be quite a big undertaking to re-ip everything but I dont feel that doing a Layer 2 span across a 10 gig wan is best practice.  Our vendor says its basically dark fiber, we can do anything on it (jumbo frame, layer2/3, vlan trunking, etc.)  They dont touch it.  Its point to point between our HQ, DR colo, furthest branch office, and then back to HQ - but they would insert a primary colo onto this ring for about $1700/$1800 a month.

Thanks for the recommendations.

[FredrikB-NN2]

If you consider using SFP+ copper modules, remember that if you do that, you cannot have any other SFP beside it, so you must leave one of two SFP ports unused. This is true for SFPs adjacent sideways, not vertically. SFP+ Cu is possible in ports 1, 5, 9, 13 and so on in the top row and in ports 2, 6, 10, 14... in the lower row. You cannot have a fiber SFP in the "empty" ones. The reason is heat and both the switch and the optics can be damaged if you do. Power is said not to be the issue, but heat is.

https://extremeportal.force.com/ExtrArticleDetail?an=000088954

As mentioned, the 7520-48Y-8C and 7520-48XT-6C would be the obvious replacements. For the fibre version you could go with the 7720 and do breakout but I don't think you can stack the 7720 with the 7520, so copper would be a no-go.

[AdrianO]

I have x690s since with copper since forever, no problem.

I would consider the universal switches, 7520 (like x690s) and 7720 if you will need qsfp ports in the future.

[jlmangas]

The X690 does not use copper SFP+, it already comes with 1/10G UTP ports. The issue with SFP+ copper Gbics is heat generation.

[AdrianO]

There is a model with 48 sfp+ ports and it is what op was referring to.