As part of the construction of a new depot, a network is being designed and installed by a sub-contractor to the builders. The designer of the network had originally planned to use three 4500 chassis's with 3750's and 2950's in the remaining locations. He has since learnt that Cisco have stopped issuing MTBF figures for the 4500 models and decided to use
3750's instead. Not only that, he is going to link modules in the stack via Gb ports rather than make use of the stacking facility (he seems to feel there is an advantage but I can't see it).
Technically our company is not the customer to the builders even though the site gets passed over to us on completion (don't ask!), so we would have to convince the body having the depot built that the 4500 option is the better one. The spec' for the network specifies reliability and MTBF comes into that, hence the designer going for devices that Cisco quote MTBF figures for.
My gut feeling is that the 4500 should have a better reliability than
3750's (and the like) when setup with redundant power supplies and redundant supervisor cards, as per the one I installed in the head office.
What do you guys think? And why would Cisco stop publishing figures for the 4500 range? It almost suggests it was becoming unreliable so they didn't want people to find out the easy way - well, would you?