Our company just went through a similar eval. We needed a high-speed core to push 10gb across our new metro DWDM for an active-active data center project.
We compared Juniper MX960, Cisco 6509, Force-10 E600 and Foundry MLX-8. Cisco - can't hang. The 96-port snake test (we sent a RFC2544 1Gb stream through 96 ports across the fabric nuked it pretty good, and the frame loss when the primary Sup was pulled was horrible. Juniper - expensive despite deep discounts. Performed very well, but not enough to justify the price. Used the newly-released 48-port copper blades and found they couldn't maintain line-rate when using 64-byte packets. Juniper confirms Force-10 - hitless upon hardware failures, very high performance. One challenge in Policy-Based Routing, but they just use a different method to do the same thing. Would be the runner up except for financial concerns, support contract was per-blade, not per-chassis, much higher than foundry Foundry - we've used a limited deployment of RX-series. The MLX performed flawlessly, the sales staff was excellent and the price was second-lowest. On a bang-for-the-buck graph, they were the choice for us. We have 8 units on order now. Hope this helps someone. (For the record, nobody wanted to be the guinea pig for the Nexus, so we left it off the eval) This message is private and confidential. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/foundry-nsp/attachments/20080618/20767c84/attachment.html>
