MPLS/MEF Switches and NIDs

Mon May 31 21:03:28 UTC 2021

EXOS is a perfectly good OS that bears absolutely no resemblance to anything else you've ever used in your career.  If you start from scratch without training courses, you're looking at wasting 6 months (maybe more) just learning the OS well enough to figure out how to configure your desired deployment.  Then you get to the usual month or so of fine-tuning required that every product needs.

Given how many companies will pay for training nowadays, it's a relevant concern IMHO.

Now that I'm used to EXOS, I like it.  But I would never recommend an EXOS newbie start a project with a product that runs EXOS, without some jump-start training.  It really is/was that painful.  It's like giving a 100% Windows admin a UNIX box to get the new service running on, with no training.  (Or vice-versa.)

NOTE: Extreme's goal (supposedly targeting 2021) was to ship one common hardware platform that could run any of their 3 OSes.  I don't know if they're achieved it, but generally speaking, for any EXOS box, there's two more products, one running the Nortel/Avaya OS and one IronWare (Foundry/Broadcom), both of which are fairly "normal".

-Adam

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[1593169877849]
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
www.merlin.mb.ca<http://www.merlin.mb.ca/>

________________________________
From: Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com>
Sent: May 31, 2021 15:30
To: Adam Thompson <athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
Cc: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: MPLS/MEF Switches and NIDs

Adam.

When you say "Beware using any EXOS-based product (anything that starts with "X") unless you're already familiar with EXOS!" Are you saying stay away from this line completely, or what do you mean by this statement. I have heard good things about Extreme for deploying service provider G.8032 and MPLS functions.

Yes, I was aware of https://www.mef.net/certify/technology-registry/ and have gone through pretty much every vendor looking at their solutions. Extreme for example is not listed at all, so I guess they didn't want to pay those fees! There are quite a few Chinese vendors we can't use.

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 12:44 PM Adam Thompson <athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>> wrote:
Extreme has excellent MEF implementations.  I've never used their MPLS implementations, but it's definitely there on, I think, all their products.  I only have the X620 model in my network, which may or may not work for you.  Beware using any EXOS-based product (anything that starts with "X") unless you're already familiar with EXOS!  I cannot emphasise this enough!
Extreme's other product lines come from Nortel/Avaya and Broadcom heritage, and also have good MEF implementations (and more-or-less-sane OSes).  They have MPLS support, but again, no experience with it.
I can't give much advice on pricing as I get both edu & gov discounts, but they are competitive with Arista and Cisco when we go to RFP.

Also, Juniper's MX (and maybe PTX?) families support MEF if that's a hard requirement.  I know some but not all EX switches have had both MEF and MPLS, too.  Beware many EX models have pretty minimalist MPLS implementations (e.g. no VPLS).  Agreed on their pricing, though, which is why I don't have any 🙂.  But for 4x10G the MX104 is a very nice box - if you can afford it.

Lastly, have you seen https://www.mef.net/certify/technology-registry/ ?

-Adam

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[1593169877849]
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
www.merlin.mb.ca<http://www.merlin.mb.ca/>

________________________________
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+athompson=merlin.mb.ca at nanog.org<mailto:merlin.mb.ca at nanog.org>> on behalf of Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com<mailto:colton.conor at gmail.com>>
Sent: May 26, 2021 11:39
To: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>>
Subject: MPLS/MEF Switches and NIDs

For MPLS and MEF switches, I know Juniper, Cisco, and Nokia are commonly talked about on this list. However, I was wondering if anyone has evaluated other brands? We are not interested in looking at chinese based vendors, so ZTE and Huawei are not an option. Anyone else worth looking into?

We have used Juniper's ACX line primarily, but there is a big gap in their product line. The ACX2200 has only two 10G ports. The next jump up from there is the ACX710 with 24 10G ports. They have nothing in between that has 4-12 10G ports. Not to mention, Juniper is very proud price wise. We are looking for cost efficient 10G NIDs with at least 4 10G ports on them and aggregation boxes with at least 12 10G ports on them with 25g/100G uplinks.

Ciena seems to have multiple options available with Segment Routing, MPLS, and streaming telemetry support. I am probably most interested in what Ciena has to offer. Has anyone deployed the 3000 or 5000 product line of Ciena? How does it compare to Juniper? The Ciena 3924 is sub $1000 for example, and has 4 10G ports on it.

Adva has quite a few options as well, but I don't think their routing stack is as strong as Ciena's.

Tejas was an unknown player to me, but they seem to have a couple of options that fit the bill. Price wise, I have heard the run circles around everyone.

RAD has some options, but their pricing looks much higher than Ciena.

Accedian looked interesting, but it seems they don't make aggregation switches, only NIDs.

ECI Telecom / Ribbon seems to have some options, but I have not talked to them.

What does Nokia and Cisco have in this space, and price wise is it going to compare to these less known vendors?

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