How Cisco IT Architected Headquarters MAN

The Cisco LAN had two sites that were two-thirds of a mile apart - the original Tasman campus and the new Zanker campus. There was no standard across the enterprise; without that, network management had become increasingly demanding. It wasn't possible to determine the effects that adding new applications would have on network traffic and on the network itself. The varied network infrastructure at Cisco presented challenges. Cisco opted to run Gigabit Ethernet on the LAN between all switches This had several advantages - it would guarantee plentiful bandwidth and would free Cisco IT from provisioning or running new fiber for a long time. And Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches offered both routing and switching capabilities - a plus for standardization and lower costs.