Still useful c6500s may be, but Cisco has published an EOL plan for this product that pretty much gives you no options for HW support or SW support, so in you would be pretty much dependent upon resale market for spares and such. Not the type of thing most businesses want to deal with as a critical part of their operations.

I don't think anyone playing around with the stuff in our circles is going to want to take out Cisco support on it and put it at the core of their production environment :-) In the retail datacenters I see less Cisco than ever. Arista is the new hotness. They use vendor silicon and have their own Fedora based OS they throw on them. But boxes do pretty well from my experience and the ones I've supported seem to be reliable. Arista support is pretty decent as well, so far. Lots of 100 gigabit and 25 gigabit these days. Still see some Juniper and Cisco for switching, Juniper for routing still a good bit. Arista has routers too, and Cisco has some newer ones. - Ethan