Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc...

[Brent Jones <brent () brentrjones com>]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List <
blake.mailinglist () pfankuch me> 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
brent () brentrjones com