QuestionQ25

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A large multinational financial institution has hired you to design a new full-stack wired and wireless network for its new 6-story regional office building. The lowest two floors of the facility will be retail space for a large banking branch. The upper floors will be carpeted corporate office space, with each floor measuring approximately 100,000 sq ft (9290 sq m). All data centers are offsite and are outside this project’s scope. The customer is underserved by its current L2-based network infrastructure and wants to apply modern best practices in the new design. The network must be fully resilient and fault-tolerant, with dynamic segmentation at the edge.

The retail space will provide public guest Wi-Fi access. Retail associates will use corporate tablets for customer service, and the retail floors will contain a mix of wired and wireless devices. Corporate users will primarily connect wirelessly, although several wired clients, printers, and hard VoIP phones will also be used.

The customer also plans to renovate the corporate office space to take advantage of 'smart office' technology. These enhancements will enable blue-dot wayfinding, presence analytics, and other location-based services.

The client wants to use lower-cost OS-CX switches in its wiring closets. It calculates that each closet will require a stack of qty 6 POE (AT) and qty 4 Gigabit Ethernet switches, stacked with low-cost DACs.

Which switch series should you recommend?

  • A CX 6100
  • B CX 6000
  • C CX 6300F
  • D CX 6200M
Explanation

Aruba CX 6300F supports a Virtual Switching Framework (VSF) stack of up to 10 members in a resilient chain or ring topology. This accommodates the required six PoE+ and four Gigabit Ethernet switches in one stack, while DAC-based Ethernet links can be used for VSF interconnection. The CX 6200 family is limited to eight stack members and the CX 6100 family to six, so neither can satisfy the 10-switch requirement.

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