Benefits (and Detriments) of Standardizing Network Equipment in a Global Organization

Thu Dec 29 04:13:28 UTC 2016

On Dec 28, 2016, at 5:34 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

>> An alternative multi-vendor approach is to use 1 vendor per stack layer,
>> but alternate layer to layer. That is; Vendor A edge router, Vendor B
>> firewall, Vendor A/C switches, Vendor D anti-SPAM software, etc. This
>> doesn't address the bug impact issue as well as it alleviates the vendor
>> "ownership" issue though...
> 
> i think this is where i say that i hope my competitors do this.  it
> is a recipe for a complex set of delicate dependencies and great fun
> debugging.
> 
One of the more spectacular failures I've seen was a bug in a network core router that caused bad into to be carried by all of that same vendor's routers across the core to the edges (made by a different vendor) which promptly barfed and locked up.  

So I'd be cautious about saying "vendor X for one layer, vendor Y for adjacent layer" as a multi-vendor strategy.

David Barak
Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts