Recommended L2 switches for a new IXP

[Mike Hammett]

I look forward to this thread. 

I think one important thing is who is your addressable market size? I'm working with a startup IXP and there's only 20 carriers in the building. A chassis based switch would be silly as there would never be that many people present. 2x 1U switches would be more than plenty in their environment. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 



----- Original Message -----

From: "Manuel Marín" <mmg at transtelco.net> 
To: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2015 12:35:15 AM 
Subject: Recommended L2 switches for a new IXP 

Dear Nanog community 

We are trying to build a new IXP in some US Metro areas where we have 
multiple POPs and I was wondering what do you recommend for L2 switches. I 
know that some IXPs use Nexus, Brocade, Force10 but I don't personally have 
experience with these switches. It would be great if you can share your 
experience and recommendations. There are so many options that I don't know 
if it makes sense to start with a modular switch (usually expensive because 
the backplane, dual dc, dual CPU, etc) or start with a 1RU high density 
switch that support new protocols like Trill and that supposedly allow you 
to create Ethernet Fabric/Clusters. The requirements are simple, 1G/10G 
ports for exchange participants, 40G/100G for uplinks between switches and 
flow support for statistics and traffic analysis. 

Thank you and have a great day. 

Regards