Arista is rock solid they have both an IOS like cli and a standard unix shell you can even run tcpdump on their switches.
Arista claim to fame came about 3-4 years back when they had at the time one of the fastest non-blocking cut though 10Gbe switches using the fulcrum asic geared for low latency environments the financial sector ate it up and loved it. Facebook is also a huge Arista shop. Sent from my iPhone On Jun 18, 2013, at 7:56 PM, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List <blake.mailingl...@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
