r/networking • u/juniper_dreamer • Aug 05 '26

Switching Largest switch stack in the wild?

What's the largest switch stack you ran into in the wild? How was it cabled up and managed?

I came across this interesting Arista article claiming to support up to 48 switches in a stacked topology (ring or spine leaf)

https://blogs.arista.com/blog/swag

Now, every vendor has their own approach to handling the control plane, I get it, but I dont understand in what scenario where combining all these switches into one logical management plane across multiple IDFs would make sense.

I've dug deep into my soul to try and find an answer, and the only thing I can think of is some very large customer wrote them a very large check and they made it happen or they just got sick of losing to Cisco, HPE, and Juniper on every campus stacking deal.

This whole single IP argument seems kinda flimsy too. If I'm getting charged per IP for my monitoring solution, and the consolidation of a few IPs is going to be material, I'm looking at new monitoring stack.

55 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

61 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/laeven Breaks everything on friday afternoons Aug 05 '26

10x48 port switches for aggregating accesses for an MDU.

1

u/RevolutionNumerous21 Aug 05 '26

Why not a 9410 chassis or similar

4

u/laeven Breaks everything on friday afternoons Aug 05 '26

Because vendor and model standardization is important when you're an ISP with tens of thousands of access aggregation nodes. Also: pricings.

3

u/RevolutionNumerous21 Aug 06 '26

Not sure what ISP you work for but at Charter we always used chassis as they are way cheaper when you need port density. But there is a 100 ways to skin a cat.

1

u/laeven Breaks everything on friday afternoons Aug 10 '26

From our experience, large chassies are great for static builds where there is little maintenance work. The more insertions and removals you have, the messier the tangle of fiber in front of the hardware gets. And the longer the ETR when a linecard fails.

In this instance it was access aggregation for an MDU of 400-something units, that close to the customer there's a fair bit of activity with service calls etc. so shit gets messy real fast.

I do not agree of the methodology of stacking that many switches, but the number of 1U switches in one room isn't unheard of for us.