nanog mailing list archives
Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc...
From: Phil Fagan <philfagan () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:14:18 -0600
Mike brings up a good point though; the effort, cost, and risk of introducing a new CLI to an environment sometimes is masked until you really need to dig in and work through outages. Familiarity with a codebase or at least with how the code "thinks" should go a long way when deciding what to put in your racks. Of course, how do you quantify that? On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Mike Hale <eyeronic.design () gmail com>wrote:
I'm exact opposite of Phil. I love IOS and hate JunOS....for that single reason, I'm really against buying Juniper in our shop for pretty much anything. :) Still, to be fair, the hardware seems to be really, really stable and well built. I don't think we've had a failure across our Junipers in the short time I've been with my day job. As far as support goes...the only time we had issues with our Nexus gear I was actually really, really disappointed with Cisco. We were upgrading our firmware, ran into some major issues with VPC and HSRP due some firmware changes, and the Tac engineer we got sucked *massive* lemons. When I call Tac with a situation like this, I expect someone who can code a working config from scratch based on the old config, not someone who's going to sit there scratching his head, running useless packet captures, and being silent when we ask questions. *sigh* /rant off On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Phil Fagan <philfagan () gmail com> wrote:I've had nothing but good luck with Juniper support and well with Ciscoyoupay for support too. I will say Arista support was great, however, I'm still hesitant to put them in full production; but I think that is lackofexperience with them speaking. Do the bake off in your lab and let'm run! On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List < blake.mailinglist () pfankuch me> wrote:Let me also clarify, Price per port is not the final deciding factor. We are looking much more at a combination of daily operational sanity, troubleshooting features, operational feature set, vendor supportqualityand price.**** ** ** Support is absolute key. When we need help, we need help quickly and knowledgeable support. The name checkpoint comes to mind when I thinkofsomething I DON’T want for support quality. It also causes nausea…**** ** ** Thanks,**** ** ** Blake**** ** ** *From:* Phil Fagan [mailto:philfagan () gmail com] *Sent:* Tuesday, June 18, 2013 6:08 PM *To:* Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List *Cc:* NANOG (nanog () nanog org) *Subject:* Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc...**** ** ** I love JUNOS, don't really care for IOS. I really trust Cisco and Juniper's hardware, with that being said Arista is your best bet for cheapest port. I've only seen Arista in lab, not in the wild yet so Ican'tspeak for how I would trust them. You mention getting bit by singlesups, Ibelieve as of late Arista has had issue with OSPF failover time between dual-sups in HA setups.**** ** ** I used to have a Dell laptop....but I'm sure their great too. In the end for me I only trust Cisco or Juniper. I've been burnt by Foundry and am waiting to on Arista. **** ** ** On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 5:53 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 afullCisco shop, however I was asked to do a price comparison as well as features with other major alternative vendors. I was also asked to dosomedigging as far as what "the real world" thinks about these possiblevendors.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 providing10gbitto a very specialized implementation. With all of our technology, wetryto not be bleeding edge, but oozing edge. We need 5 9's or more ofuptimeyearly so stability is preferable to cool features. We currently have single supervisors in all of our switches (not my decision) and it hasbitus recently. Everything we are looking at needs to support NSF/SSO/VSSofsome kind. What we have been looking to replace it with in Cisco world is Nexus7004Core and Nexus 5596UP with 2200 series Fabric extenders for Dist/Accessaswell as 2200 Fabric Extenders within our Dell Blade Chassis.Realisticallywe will be under 800 ports of 10gbit (excluding Blades) which puts usin atough 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" andinvestigatepossible 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 theyhave alot 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. Also24x4support and hardware replacement. Everything in our datacentercurrentlyhas a 2 or 4 hour cisco contract on it and critical core componentshave acold spare in inventory. Dell Force 10... I know Dell tries to get you to drink the Koolaid onthissolution, I was a former Dell Partner and they even pushed me to getdemoequipment 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? Ithasbeen 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**** **** ** ** -- **** Phil Fagan**** Denver, CO**** 970-480-7618****-- Phil Fagan Denver, CO 970-480-7618-- 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
-- Phil Fagan Denver, CO 970-480-7618
Current thread:
- Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Phil Fagan (Jun 18)
- RE: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Michel de Nostredame (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Phil Fagan (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Mike Hale (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Phil Fagan (Jun 18)
- RE: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Phil Fagan (Jun 18)
- Re: Network Vendor suggestions/reviews, Arista Networks, Dell Force10, Juniper, Extreme Networks etc... Michel de Nostredame (Jun 18)