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

Wed Jun 19 02:14:18 UTC 2013

Mike brings up a good point though; the effort, cost, and risk of
introducing a new CLI to an environment sometimes is masked until you
really need to dig in and work through outages. Familiarity with a codebase
or at least with how the code "thinks" should go a long way when deciding
what to put in your racks. Of course, how do you quantify that?

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Mike Hale <eyeronic.design at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm exact opposite of Phil.  I love IOS and hate JunOS....for that
> single reason, I'm really against buying Juniper in our shop for
> pretty much anything.  :)
>
> Still, to be fair, the hardware seems to be really, really stable and
> well built.  I don't think we've had a failure across our Junipers in
> the short time I've been with my day job.
>
> As far as support goes...the only time we had issues with our Nexus
> gear I was actually really, really disappointed with Cisco.  We were
> upgrading our firmware, ran into some major issues with VPC and HSRP
> due some firmware changes, and the Tac engineer we got sucked
> *massive* lemons.  When I call Tac with a situation like this, I
> expect someone who can code a working config from scratch based on the
> old config, not someone who's going to sit there scratching his head,
> running useless packet captures, and being silent when we ask
> questions.  *sigh*
>
> /rant off
>
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Phil Fagan <philfagan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've had nothing but good luck with Juniper support and well with Cisco
> you
> > pay for support too. I will say Arista support was great, however, I'm
> > still hesitant to put them in full production; but I think that is lack
> of
> > experience with them speaking.
> >
> > Do the bake off in your lab and let'm run!
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List <
> > blake.mailinglist at pfankuch.me> wrote:
> >
> >>  Let me also clarify, Price per port is not the final deciding factor.
> >> We are looking much more at a combination of daily operational sanity,
> >> troubleshooting features, operational feature set, vendor support
> quality
> >> and price.****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> Support is absolute key.  When we need help, we need help quickly and
> >> knowledgeable support.  The name checkpoint comes to mind when I think
> of
> >> something I DON’T want for support quality.  It also causes nausea…****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> Thanks,****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> Blake****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> *From:* Phil Fagan [mailto:philfagan at gmail.com]
> >> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 18, 2013 6:08 PM
> >> *To:* Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List
> >> *Cc:* NANOG (nanog at nanog.org)
> >> *Subject:* Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell
> >> Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc...****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> I love JUNOS, don't really care for IOS. I really trust Cisco and
> >> Juniper's hardware, with that being said Arista is your best bet for
> >> cheapest port. I've only seen Arista in lab, not in the wild yet so I
> can't
> >> speak for how I would trust them. You mention getting bit by single
> sups, I
> >> believe as of late Arista has had issue with OSPF failover time between
> >> dual-sups in HA setups.****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> I used to have a Dell laptop....but I'm sure their great too. In the end
> >> for me I only trust Cisco or Juniper. I've been burnt by Foundry and am
> >> waiting to on Arista. ****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List <
> >> blake.mailinglist at 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****
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ****
> >>
> >> ** **
> >>
> >> -- ****
> >>
> >> Phil Fagan****
> >>
> >> Denver, CO****
> >>
> >> 970-480-7618****
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Phil Fagan
> > Denver, CO
> > 970-480-7618
>
>
>
> --
> 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
>

-- 
Phil Fagan
Denver, CO
970-480-7618