Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc...

[Andreas Larsen <andreas.larsen () ip-only se>]

I have worked with both Extreme,  Juniper, Cisco and Brocade and Avaya.

Extreme. 
Great boxes stable and afforadable when it comes to 10GE and 40GE. Truly
one XOS for all boxes, lowend x440 has the same XOS as 48*10GE
device.Support sucks very bad though if you can't get your SE to support
you.

Juniper 
Great boxes, very nice CLI, good support with a nice ticketsystem and good
kb. However I have found alot of bugs that needs to be corrected in the
switch series that are somewhat annoying.

Cisco 
Good boxes, expensive great support and a amazing KB.

Brocade
Good boxed, a tad expensive. Open to opensoucre when it comes to SDN
stuff. 

Avaya 
Great boxes, SPB all the way =), not a solid true OS yet but some
different ones on different boxes, but to my mind the SPB solution gives
you the most flexability in a datacenter today and you can even in the
long run mix vendors if you like since it's open and standarized.


Short rant =)  Hope you find the vendor you like the best and by all means
take in a couple of them for test.

Med vänlig hälsning
Andreas Larsen
 
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Den 2013-06-19 05:17 skrev Brent Jones <brent () brentrjones com>:

> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List <
> blake.mailinglist () pfankuch me> wrote:
>
> > Howdy,
> >                 I have been working on a proposal for the organization I
> > work for to move into the 10gbit datacenter.  We have a small datacenter
> > currently of about 1000 ports of 1gbit.  We have traditionally been a
> > full
> > Cisco shop, however I was asked to do a price comparison as well as
> > features with other major alternative vendors.  I was also asked to do
> > some
> > digging as far as what "the real world" thinks about these possible
> > vendors.
> >
> > We currently have 2 Cisco 6509's with 8 48 port cards Sup 3BXL, 2 Cisco
> > 4506 with 5x 48 port card and Sup V's and 2 4900M switches providing
> > 10gbit
> > to a very specialized implementation.  With all of our technology, we
> > try
> > to not be bleeding edge, but oozing edge.  We need 5 9's or more of
> > uptime
> > yearly so stability is preferable to cool features.  We currently have
> > single supervisors in all of our switches (not my decision) and it has
> > bit
> > us recently.  Everything we are looking at needs to support NSF/SSO/VSS
> > of
> > some kind.
> >
> > What we have been looking to replace it with in Cisco world is Nexus
> > 7004
> > Core and Nexus 5596UP with 2200 series Fabric extenders for Dist/Access
> > as
> > well as 2200 Fabric Extenders within our Dell Blade Chassis.
> > Realistically
> > we will be under 800 ports of 10gbit (excluding Blades) which puts us
> > in a
> > tough spot from what I can find.  Currently everything we have is EOR,
> > however TOR would make more sense allowing us to switch to SFP+ twinax
> > connectivity to servers.
> >
> > With this in mind, I have a few questions...
> >
> > It was mandated that I look at a company "Arista Networks" and
> > investigate
> > possible options.  I had not heard much about them, so I look to the
> > experts.  Pro's and Con's?  Real world experience?  Looks to me they
> > have a
> > lot of cool features, but I'm slightly concerned with how new they might
> > be, how reliable it would be as well as their QA/bugfix history.  Also
> > 24x4
> > support and hardware replacement.  Everything in our datacenter
> > currently
> > has a 2 or 4 hour cisco contract on it and critical core components
> > have a
> > cold spare in inventory.
> >
> > Dell Force 10... I know Dell tries to get you to drink the Koolaid on
> > this
> > solution, I was a former Dell Partner and they even pushed me to get
> > demo
> > equipment going...  What's the experience with their chassis switches?
> >  Stability?  Configuration sanity?  What do people like?  What do people
> > hate?
> >
> > Juniper.  What do people like? What do people hate?  Have the Layer 2
> > issues of historical age gone away?  Is the config still xml ish?  It
> > has
> > been about 5 years since I worked with anything Juniper.
> >
> > Extreme networks.  I know very little about them historically.  What is
> > good, what is bad?  Is the config sane?
> >
> > I would be happy to compile any information I find, as well as our
> > sanitized internal conclusions.  On and off list responses welcome.
> >
> > If there is another vendor anyone would suggest, please add them to the
> > list with similarly asked questions.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Blake
>
> Coming from first hand experience, all network equipment vendors have
> strengths and weaknesses.
> Personally, I prefer the Junos CLI and ecosystem, but it is a learning
> curve, especially with a larger team who may not be familiar with it.
> But I found once I grasped the "Junos way", I'm significantly more
> productive with less errors, and "commit confirmed" is much better than
> Cisco comparable rollback methods.
> Juniper also offers several methods for automation: Junoscript/SLAX,
> Netconf, and now Puppet integration.
>
> I also have experience with Force10, and minor experience with Arista,
> both
> good vendors. They will be immieditely familiar to your team, since they
> use the same commands mostly.
> I find Juniper's virtual chassis to be among the better stacking
> technologies, but everyone has their own take. Force10 and Arista do
> really
> good multi-chassis LAG, as well as the Juniper QFX lineup.
>
> These days, vendors are really competitive on pricing and offerings, so
> you
> really can't go wrong  :)
>
> -- 
> Brent Jones
> brent () brentrjones com