Just got home from work. Interesting day - very busy. I changed out one of the core switches today. Very nice piece of kit. The job is a little nerve racking as you must be quite careful of the surrounding connections. Knocking one of those out or kinking a fiber cable and breaking the filaments means very sad times.

I had to push the switch out of the back of the rack, due to patching on the front side. This meant extracting the switch on the front size 80-100mm and then removing the ears on the sides. It was then able to slide to the rear of the rack.

The core switch is a HP Procurve 48 port gig switch. It's got 4 gig fiber uplinks. The other really cool part is the module in the back. The HP J9049. This module allows you two CX4 stacking ports as well as two 10gig GBIC slots.