"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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > >
