On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List < [email protected]> wrote:
> Howdy, > I have been working on a proposal for the organization I > work for to move into the 10gbit datacenter. We have a small datacenter > currently of about 1000 ports of 1gbit. We have traditionally been a full > Cisco shop, however I was asked to do a price comparison as well as > features with other major alternative vendors. I was also asked to do some > digging as far as what "the real world" thinks about these possible vendors. > > We currently have 2 Cisco 6509's with 8 48 port cards Sup 3BXL, 2 Cisco > 4506 with 5x 48 port card and Sup V's and 2 4900M switches providing 10gbit > to a very specialized implementation. With all of our technology, we try > to not be bleeding edge, but oozing edge. We need 5 9's or more of uptime > yearly so stability is preferable to cool features. We currently have > single supervisors in all of our switches (not my decision) and it has bit > us recently. Everything we are looking at needs to support NSF/SSO/VSS of > some kind. > > What we have been looking to replace it with in Cisco world is Nexus 7004 > Core and Nexus 5596UP with 2200 series Fabric extenders for Dist/Access as > well as 2200 Fabric Extenders within our Dell Blade Chassis. Realistically > we will be under 800 ports of 10gbit (excluding Blades) which puts us in a > tough spot from what I can find. Currently everything we have is EOR, > however TOR would make more sense allowing us to switch to SFP+ twinax > connectivity to servers. > > With this in mind, I have a few questions... > > It was mandated that I look at a company "Arista Networks" and investigate > possible options. I had not heard much about them, so I look to the > experts. Pro's and Con's? Real world experience? Looks to me they have a > lot of cool features, but I'm slightly concerned with how new they might > be, how reliable it would be as well as their QA/bugfix history. Also 24x4 > support and hardware replacement. Everything in our datacenter currently > has a 2 or 4 hour cisco contract on it and critical core components have a > cold spare in inventory. > > Dell Force 10... I know Dell tries to get you to drink the Koolaid on this > solution, I was a former Dell Partner and they even pushed me to get demo > equipment going... What's the experience with their chassis switches? > Stability? Configuration sanity? What do people like? What do people > hate? > > Juniper. What do people like? What do people hate? Have the Layer 2 > issues of historical age gone away? Is the config still xml ish? It has > been about 5 years since I worked with anything Juniper. > > Extreme networks. I know very little about them historically. What is > good, what is bad? Is the config sane? > > I would be happy to compile any information I find, as well as our > sanitized internal conclusions. On and off list responses welcome. > > If there is another vendor anyone would suggest, please add them to the > list with similarly asked questions. > > Thanks! > > Blake > Coming from first hand experience, all network equipment vendors have strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I prefer the Junos CLI and ecosystem, but it is a learning curve, especially with a larger team who may not be familiar with it. But I found once I grasped the "Junos way", I'm significantly more productive with less errors, and "commit confirmed" is much better than Cisco comparable rollback methods. Juniper also offers several methods for automation: Junoscript/SLAX, Netconf, and now Puppet integration. I also have experience with Force10, and minor experience with Arista, both good vendors. They will be immieditely familiar to your team, since they use the same commands mostly. I find Juniper's virtual chassis to be among the better stacking technologies, but everyone has their own take. Force10 and Arista do really good multi-chassis LAG, as well as the Juniper QFX lineup. These days, vendors are really competitive on pricing and offerings, so you really can't go wrong :) -- Brent Jones [email protected]
