opinions on routers/switches for parallel clusters

Tue Jun 19 04:48:44 UTC 2001

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:15:10AM -0500, keichii at freebsd.org scribbled:

Thank you all for your replies.  Here is the result summed
from the 21 emails that I received privately and publicly.
It overwhelmingly leans towards one vendor. :)

[Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Extreme Networks.]

BTW, just to clarify myself, we are not hostile towards
Cisco.  We currently use almost exclusively Cisco on our site.
It's just that we did not think it to be necessary
to be asking about a brand so well known to us and NANOG.
Furthermore, we like to keep our minds open for other products.

(There were people who suggested multiple choices.)

Count	Vendor
============================
18 	Extreme Networks (with load balancer being F5 Net)
4	Cisco
4	misc (Foundry, Riverstone)

I also talked to the Extreme Networks sales engineer
who responded to me in private.  (I guess they know
where to look for customers 8). )  She even offered a
loaner before I asked.  Extreme's pricing is at least less 
than half the Cisco price at retail, before mass purchase discounts.
(The Cisco products also has less features at a higher price tag.)

Adding in the extra load balancer and router costs,
using Extreme is still extremely competitive in both
price and functionality.

-- 
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| keichii at iteration.net         | keichii at freebsd.org       |
| http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. |
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