Rack rails on network equipment

Sat Sep 25 19:48:38 UTC 2021

Well, folks, the replies have certainly been interesting. I did get my
answer, which seems to be "no one cares", which, in turn, explains why
network equipment manufacturers give very little to no attention to this
problem. A point of clarification is I'm talking about the problem in the
context of operating a data center with cabinet racks, not a telecom closet
with 2 post racks.

Let me just say from the get go that no one is making toolless rails a
priority to the point of shutting vendors out of the evaluation process. I
am not quite sure why that assumption was made by at least a few folks.
With that said, when all things being equal or fairly equal, which they
rarely are, that's when the rails come in as a factor.

We operate over 1000 switches in our data centers, and hardware failures
that require a switch swap are common enough where the speed of swap starts
to matter to some extent. We probably swap a switch or two a month.
Furthermore, those switches several of you referenced, which run for 5+
years are not the ones we use. I think you are thinking of the legacy days
where you pay $20k plus for a top of rack switch from Cisco, and then sweat
that switch until it dies of old age. I used to operate exactly like that
in my earlier days. This does not work for us for a number of reasons, and
so we don't go down that path.

We use Force10 family Dell switches which are basically Broadcom TD2+/TD3
based switches (ON4000 and ON5200 series) and we run Cumulus Linux on
those, so swapping hardware without swapping the operating system for us is
quite plausible and very much possible. We just haven't had the need to
switch away from Dell until recently after Cumulus Networks (now Nvidia)
had a falling out with Broadcom and effectively will cease support for
Broadcom ASICs in the near future. We have loads of network config
automation rolled out and very little of it is tied to anything Cumulus
Linux specific, so there is a fair chance to switch over to Sonic with low
to medium effort on our part, thus returning to the state where we can
switch hardware vendors with fairly low effort. We are looking at Nvidia
(former Mellanox) switches which hardly have any toolless rails, and we are
also looking at all the other usual suspects in the "white box" world,
which is why I asked how many of you care about the rail kit and I got my
answer: "very little to not at all". In my opinion, if you never ask,
you'll never get it, so I am asking my vendors for toolless rails, even if
most of them will likely never get there, since I'm probably one of the
very few who even brights that question up to them. I'd say network
equipment has always been in a sad state of being compared to, well, just
about any other equipment and for some reason we are all more or less
content with it. May I suggest you all at least raise that question to your
suppliers even if you know full well the answer is "no". At least it will
start showing the vendors there is demand for this feature.

On the subject of new builds. Over the course of my career I have hired
contractors to rack/stack large build-outs and a good number of them treat
your equipment the same way they treat their 2x4s. They torque all the
screws to such a degree that when you have to undo that, you are sweating
like a pig trying to undo one screw, eventually stripping it, so you have
to drill that out, etc, etc. How is that acceptable? I'm not trying to say
that _every_ contractor does that, but a lot do to the point that that
matters. I have no interest in discussing how to babysit contractors so
they don't screw up your equipment.

I will also concede that operating 10 switches in a colo cage probably
doesn't warrant considerations for toolless rails. Operating 500 switches
and growing per site?... It slowly starts to matter. And when your outlook
is expansion, then it starts to matter even more.

Thanks to all of you for your contribution. It definitely shows the
perspective I was looking for.

Special thanks to Jason How-Kow, who linked the Arista toolless rails
(ironically we have Arista evals in the pipeline and I didn't know they do
toolless, so it's super helpful)

--Andrey

On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 9:37 AM Andrey Khomyakov <khomyakov.andrey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi folks,
> Happy Friday!
>
> Would you, please, share your thoughts on the following matter?
>
> Back some 5 years ago we pulled the trigger and started phasing out Cisco
> and Juniper switching products out of our data centers (reasons for that
> are not quite relevant to the topic). We selected Dell switches in part due
> to Dell using "quick rails'' (sometimes known as speed rails or toolless
> rails).  This is where both the switch side rail and the rack side rail
> just snap in, thus not requiring a screwdriver and hands of the size no
> bigger than a hamster paw to hold those stupid proprietary screws (lookin
> at your, cisco) to attach those rails.
> We went from taking 16hrs to build a row of compute (from just network
> equipment racking pov) to maybe 1hr... (we estimated that on average it
> took us 30 min to rack a switch from cut open the box with Juniper switches
> to 5 min with Dell switches)
> Interesting tidbit is that we actually used to manufacture custom rails
> for our Juniper EX4500 switches so the switch can be actually inserted from
> the back of the rack (you know, where most of your server ports are...) and
> not be blocked by the zero-U PDUs and all the cabling in the rack. Stock
> rails didn't work at all for us unless we used wider racks, which then, in
> turn, reduced floor capacity.
>
> As far as I know, Dell is the only switch vendor doing toolless rails so
> it's a bit of a hardware lock-in from that point of view.
>
> *So ultimately my question to you all is how much do you care about the
> speed of racking and unracking equipment and do you tell your suppliers
> that you care? How much does the time it takes to install or replace a
> switch impact you?*
>
> I was having a conversation with a vendor and was pushing hard on the fact
> that their switches will end up being actually costlier for me long term
> just because my switch replacement time quadruples at least, thus requiring
> me to staff more remote hands. Am I overthinking this and artificially
> limiting myself by excluding vendors who don't ship with toolless rails
> (which is all of them now except Dell)?
>
> Thanks for your time in advance!
> --Andrey
>
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