Summary of responses: Lucent/Avaya Cajun experiences

Wed Sep 24 19:08:49 UTC 2003

Well, thanks to all who replied.  I've attached annotated replies at the
bottom of this message.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Andy Grosser wrote:
> This request is largely for anecdotal/historical purposes.  The recent
> Foundry/Riverstone posts reminded me of a topic I'd kept meaning to
> broach.
>
> My organization will probably be replacing all of our L2/L3 Lucent/Avaya
> Cajun switches in the next few months with Catalyst 65XX series boxes.
> Our experience has largely been disastrous - 3 operational years have been
> filled with _constant_ HW and SW failures, buggy code (i.e. backplane
> suddenly stops all traffic forwarding), horrible tech support, lousy
> online resources (a la SW releases).  Their M770 ATM gear hasn't been much
> better, and their PacketStar media gateways are still, surprisingly,
> limping along.
>
> Anyone care to share their own Lucent/Avaya experiences?

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We have 1000 ports of Cajun 550 with redundant management- never had a
problem with anything in 2 years.

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friend's experience mirrors yours...

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Actually tying back into the previous conversation, I have first hand
knowledge that DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), which is
essentially the telco for all of the military is swapping out all of their
Cajuns and Lucent AP1000s with Riverstone RS 8000s. Both Cisco and Juniper
couldn't meet the requirements during the bakeoff.

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After the extreme 48 port switch I have at home died, I bought a 24
port cajun as my home network.

So far, the interface sucks.  While it works fine for what I need (a
few vlans is most of what I need).  Here's the list of my qualms:

1) Every time I reboot my switch seems to believe that its 1970.  I've
got an ntp server for it to sync to, but it won't.  There doesn't seem
to be a cli option to set the time, either.

2) show port doesn't give any per-interface stats.  That's hidden away
in "show rmon statistics" and once there I have to subtract 1024 to
figure out which interface I'm looking at.  Its not too helpful when
I'm trying to figure out what ended being a cable problem.

Besides that, its a nice home switch.  Well, I guess its a home switch
for someone who cares about the news on nanog.  I wish my extreme was
still working, though.

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Bought a P333 off of eBay. Two days later, the management card quit
talking to the switch backplane. Got a 133, it's been flawless ever since
but is on a protected network.

Marconi/FORE has also rebranded the P333 has a ESX-1800.

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We had a P550 that turned up in our department that was the worst piece of
networking equipment we had on our network (before we upgraded to all
alcatel omniswitch and omnicore gear had cabletron 10bt hubs). Had
problems with vlan bleeding on it, seemed to require constant reboots, it
would just randomly stop working correctly. One cool thing it could do is
auto learn vlans for the gig ports, however that was about the only cool
thing.

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We have 5 Lucent PM4 boxes. They were $250-300k when they came out. Within
60 days of the Lucent/Ascend merger, the product was dead. All development
stopped and many stupid bugs which would have been easy to fix were never
resolved. Promised developments never came. Free upgrades for life ended.
The product never evolved from the expensive boat anchor it was when we
first bought it. The PM4s work reasonably well for old v.90 RAS boxes, but
they never became the VoIP, v.92, super stable boxes they were touted to
be
when they were introduced. In the middle of all this, my Lucent sales rep
called to see if we wanted to buy Cajun switches to replace our Catalysts.
I said, "I don't think I'd take them if you gave them to me." She replied
by saying she didn't blame me and "they weren't that good anyway." Can you
believe it?!?! I saw a tractor trailer load of them for sale (literally) a
few years ago for about $2500. It was a list of hundreds of boards and
chassis all brand new. I spoke to a friend who still worked at Lucent and
he told me they stopped using them in the lab and bought a number of Cisco
Catalysts because they had too many problems with them. :) We haven't
bought a Lucent product since and I never will again.

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[end of responses]

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Andy Grosser, CCNP
andy at meniscus.org

"After all, if a bumbling Zen-like talking penguin
 with a thing for canned herring and pinwheel hats
 and sly meditations on the state of the galaxy
 can't save the damn nation, well, who can?"
	- Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
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