Secure Stack as chassis

[Rainer_Adam]

The need on the market rises for high density devices, more ports, NAC capabilities, maybe some Basic routing. In my opinion it could be a great idea to build an chassis to take up to 7 "modules". This modules could be C or B-Serie's without chassis and powersupply to put it in, like Cabletron did it in the 1990's with the 6H252-17 vs. 2H252-25R. What did you think about this? The benefit is having a full power redundacy chassis with 3, 5 or 7 slots, easy to maintane and expand.

[Jim_Corbett]

Ranier, Thanks for the feedback. A low cost chassis could be a nice addition to the portfolio. We will consider your ideas as we enter the planning phases for the next generation products. Regards, -Jim Corbett - Modular Switching Product Manager - Enterasys

[JAMES_WIEDEL]

Rainer, The 6000/E7 chassis with their 2200 counterparts were fabulous. But remember there were two ways of managing the beast: Individual switches or common management for the chassis. We ran SFS with individual switches that understood they were in a chassis which was sorta the best of both worlds. The gotcha with the B&C stacks in the chassis is the same as just a stack: when they work, they are great, but when something breaks they can be really horrible to diagnose. I've seen multiple vendor's stacks just go completely nuts, taking hours to figure out, event with the manufacturer's help. Chassis based system just seem to do the right thing when something goes south. Fewer power cords with power redundancy is a real win however. Maybe if the manufacturers want to add the internal back plane ports, eliminating stacking cables you would have something. (The back plane ports are going to add costs to the system unfortunately.)

[Rainer_Adam]

I will give you also some reasons for my idea. Very often it happens that the customers want to have a cheaper chassis based solution with fully redundancy. So the Secure-Stack serie's provide all of these, you only need to connect the Stacking ports together, and the internal power supply and connect all together with existing power supply's like the G3-PWR's with front access. This could be very cheap developed in my opinion.

[Tamera_Rousseau]

Hi Rainer and thanks for the suggestion! I am not aware of plans for this, but I will take this to our PM team to discuss and will update you when I know something. Thanks again!