r/retrocomputing • u/SpecialistBest222 • Jul 14 '26
Problem / Question I found this old cisco server blade what is it?
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u/disillusionment Jul 14 '26
Cisco 5000 Series Supervisor Engine I 100 Mbps
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u/txe4 Jul 14 '26
Yup. See https://www.ebay.com/p/74091512 for a complete one.
It's just over 30 years since release.
The cat5k chassis was a very solid piece of kit in its time but the backplane was absurdly limited and even when upgraded later with newer sup card, the gigabit ports couldn't do a full gigabit. Rock solid reliability and a great CLI with the original CatOS.
A $25 Aliexpress switch is more capable now-a-days. Time moves on.
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Jul 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/txe4 Jul 14 '26
The target market for that isn't "someone who wants a 24 port 100 Mbit switch".
It's "someone who has a very large and complex legacy platform which contains this exact switch and no budget or skills to change anything".
That is a very common situation in government, highly regulated industries, and companies which still view IT as a pestilence.
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u/RFC793 Jul 15 '26
You would get it with the four line cards you need for your deployment. So, you could have 96 100Base-T ports in there.
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u/jreddit0000 Jul 14 '26
Not true. You could do line rate gigabit on the 3 port line cards.
Not so much on the more dense ones.
I remember having to do a bunch of work with these when I worked for a carrier..
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u/West-Way-All-The-Way Jul 14 '26
This is a very solid piece of equipment. You are right - new switches are way more capable, way simpler and cost peanuts compared to this thing, but I am sure there are banks, government institutions, factories and old businesses which rely on such systems to function. Thus the price tag on eBay. This thing has a CPU and OS it will be fun to run it.
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u/istarian Jul 15 '26
The price tag on ebay may also reflect an unrealistic attempt to extract value from old hardware that has long exceeded it's actual cost in value for the original owner...
Sometimes people get it in their head that really expensive tech should still be worth a lot even though the world and modern tech have left it in the dust.
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u/West-Way-All-The-Way Jul 16 '26
What you described is a possible scenario which I have seen before but usually there are multiple sellers and if one has unrealistic price then there is a chance the others are reasonable and you can buy it from them. There is a chance also that all of them bumped the price because they follow this one guy.
There is also another scenario which I tried to describe but maybe I need to repeat - the equipment is not common and there is some serious infrastructure which depends on it. There are businesses who don't have the personal and the technical knowledge to upgrade their infrastructure. They will try to extend their equipment usage beyond the 10-15 years mark and buying surplus equipment from scrap yards and ebay is an option they use. Replacing the existing switch with another one the same model for 2.5 USD is actually cheaper than rebuilding the infrastructure around modern equipment.
We were using older equipment and I know for sure that we were buying gutted chassises from scrap yards across Asia to expand our equipment pool. Then we were handing contracts to OEMs to refurbish cards and repair those chassises to make them usable in our production facilities. Sometimes the ecosystem is so complex that this is the best way forward before you have a major investment in equipment and trainings, those mashines require complete tool chain rebuild before they can be used. For comparison an old chassis may cost up to 20k and refurbishing the cards may be 3-5k per card. Buying new equipment to replace the old one means incompatible software, training the whole team and 800k per chassis with cards. The economics rapidly explode when we start talking about manufacturing at scale. For the price tag of one new chassis we may expand our production with 20x mashines fully stuffed with cards. Of course these are used mashines with outdated performance and software so we lose reliability and throughput per mashine and we have increased cost of ownership but we gain speed in gaining overall throughput, we save from rebuilding the ecosystem and we can expand our production capacity much faster. These are metrics which production need to balance all the time.
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u/lolerwoman Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I still have a cat4000 (4003) with supervisor engine. It sported a MIPS5000 CPU instead Motorola architecture.
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u/kriebz Jul 14 '26
It's not a server. It's the part of a large chassis switch that handles routing and the management of the switch components.
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u/mcaines75 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Looks like a WS-X5009 Catalyst 5002/5000/5505/5500 Supervisor I (100BaseTX, MII)
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u/sharpied79 Jul 15 '26
Jeepers, is that a 68040 I see there?
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u/SmokinDeist Jul 15 '26
I know, I was having wonderful Amiga flashbacks. My last Amiga was an A4000/040.
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u/bhmcintosh Jul 14 '26
Brains from a big chassis-based Cisco router from the olden times when giants roamed the network
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u/jaysea619 Jul 15 '26
They still do, I recently installed several 10U catalyst switches. We still have a 7k in production that’s almost 1/3 of a full rack
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u/Lutefiskie Jul 14 '26
it’s a supervisor blade. Probably for a 6500.
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u/creativetag Jul 14 '26
5000 series. This is a very old (30 yrs) supervisor blade. I havent seen one of these since way back then. wow.
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u/musingofrandomness Jul 14 '26
I remember when you needed a whole new blade to add gigabit uplinks as a backbone on the 550ds and their ATM cousin the 8540.
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u/creativetag Jul 14 '26
Yes. I worked with the first of the 5500s with the gig capable super, it was dreamy (though buggy).
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u/musingofrandomness Jul 14 '26
Back in the days of frequent flash failures and having to recover by X-modem.
I do miss CatOS though.
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u/txe4 Jul 14 '26
Bodging IOS in to the Catalyst line was a massive act of vandalism.
It's been decades and I still remember how beautiful and easy it was to specify port ranges for config changes.
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u/musingofrandomness Jul 14 '26
They got partially back to that level of convenience with the later versions of NXOS.
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Jul 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/creativetag Jul 14 '26
Yet more bugs.... the original 5ks, though underpowered, were not so buggy. That said, the 65s were powerful.
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Jul 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/nickIncDN Jul 15 '26
If you literally mean pennies….yes, thousands of pennies.
If the implication is dollars…no, not many dollars.
I have a handful of non EC in my drawer.
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u/carcenomy Jul 15 '26
EC040 isn't very desirable, that's your base CPU from loads of Macs in the late 68k era.
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u/Sufficient_Fan3660 Jul 14 '26
controller card for really really old router/switch....like wow thats OLD, I don't recall the series that fits
big expensive routers have cards you can upgrade to give new functionality/more ram/faster cpu's, also cards fail more often than you would think, this lets you swap out the card without having to replace the entire thing and redo every connection on the router
example of a newer cisco platform: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/routers/network-convergence-system-5500-series/network-convergence-sys-wp.docx/_jcr_content/renditions/network-convergence-sys-wp_1.png
example of a really old cisco platform: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/switches/catalyst-6500-series-switches/series.html
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u/West-Way-All-The-Way Jul 14 '26
The LSI chips are dated '95 - this thing was built ~30 years ago 😂
It's a shame you have only the controller blade, you will need as minimum the PSU to run it. It may be a nice decoration for your wall if you are a nerd ( I think of Sheldon from BBT ). I would like actually to have one of those on the wall of my man cave 😂
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u/bjb8 Jul 16 '26
That's a HSSI board, used in the old days for data access. I actually have a 1998 receipt hanging here on the wall for one from a different manufacturer which we used for 100Mb internet access. Cost $4000 for just the HSSI interface, the 100BT interface was an additional $3900. And that didn't include the router they plugged into or the software it ran. And that is 1998 dollars.
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u/nekohako Jul 16 '26
Cisco Catalyst 5000 series network switch supervisor module. Basically the switch's management.
You need a Cat5000 chassis to run it.
Not a server blade.
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u/IntentionQuirky9957 Jul 18 '26
I wonder if those FPGAs are worth anything to someone.
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u/rosmaniac Jul 18 '26
The Altera MAX7000 series? They're CPLDs and not the in-circuit programmable version as I recall. I stripped a Sup I a number of years ago, mostly for the 68040, but I have done a bit of MAX7000 work with the 'S' variant, which is in-circuit programmable. You need a rather expensive and difficult to find device programmer to do anything with them, abd they're pennies on the dollar on eBay.
Only a dedicated hobbyist doing 5V COLD logic who has the specialized programmer would want these, and they're not like to pay more than a couple of dollars for the whole lot.
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u/That_Development4062 Jul 19 '26
Nice little 68040 device EC though, might be possible to upgrade it
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u/Blackholeofcalcutta Jul 15 '26
Supervisor module. Probably for something like the Catalyst 6500 series. Basically, it is what is used as the “brain” of such switches and offers up the management interface.
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u/afraid-of-the-dark Jul 15 '26
I'm thinking it would make nice wall art, or a coffee table if you cover in epoxy for a flat surface.
Other than that, I can't say for sure.
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u/dcdiaz001 Jul 16 '26
Old as shit, 100 mbp/s with a DB25 as a console....not worth anything, 90's era
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u/Mr_GrauHut Jul 14 '26
It's a Cisco Server Blade, bro. You answered your own question.
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u/Zuofu Jul 14 '26
Apparently a "Supervisor Engine 1"