On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Jo Rhett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
