Re: Force10 Gear - Opinions

["Chris Riling" <criling () gmail com>]

"Then again, I've always had a good support experience with Extreme,
but I'm not about to run out and replace my core with Black Diamonds.
:)"

I once worked at a place where we had BD 6808's at the core; one of them
consistently had hardware issues, and it took me the better part of a year
of fighting with Extreme to get them to replace the chassis, but when they
did, the problems went away, imagine that. I suppose similar isolated
incidents could happen with anyone occasionally though.

Chris

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Paul Wall <pauldotwall () gmail com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Jo Rhett <jrhett () netconsonance com>
> wrote:
> > > 1)       Reliability
> >
> > Very good.  Across our entire business we've lost 1 RPM module in ~2
> years.
>
> How many boxes in total?  Losing a single routing engine in two years
> is not a bad MTBF, though I wonder if we're talking about one chassis
> or one thousand.
>
> > > 2)       Performance
> >
> > [Note: we have no 10g interfaces, so I can only speak to a
> many-singleg-port
> > environment]
> > Much higher than Cisco.  So good at dealing with traffic problems that we
> > have had multi-gig DoS attacks that we wouldn't have known about without
> > having an IDS running on a mirroring port.
>
> Routing n*GE at line rate isn't difficult these days, even with all
> 64-byte packets and other "DoS" conditions.
>
> Linksys, D-Link, SMC, etc are able to pull it off on the layer 3
> switches sold at Fry's for a couple benjamins a pop.  :)
>
> Now mind you, this is all traffic through the router.  I'd imagine
> Force 10 would have a problem with traffic aimed at its interface or
> loopback IPs, given their lack of control plane policing/filtering,
> unlike say:
>
> http://aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu/papers/copp.html
>
> > > 3)       Support staff (how knowledgeable are they?)
> >
> > Significantly higher than Cisco, and escalation is easier.  On par with
> > Juniper.
>
> This is good, though not necessarily hard when you have a small pool
> of TAC people.
>
> Then again, I've always had a good support experience with Extreme,
> but I'm not about to run out and replace my core with Black Diamonds.
> :)
>
> > These things are so very solid that I rarely spend any time doing network
> > work any more.  Gigabit line-speed BCP38 makes life easier for the abuse
> > helpdesk too.
>
> I'm unaware of any hardware-forwarding-based platforms which can't do this.
>
> Though if I find any, I'll be sure to steer clear!
>
> Paul Wall