[c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco

[Dennis]

We've had horror stories for years with Extreme gear in our Enterprise and
are currently in the process of replacing it all with Cisco. We've had
regular hardware failures and software failures on BD 6808s and 6816s. It's
better since we upgraded to MSM3s but there are still many problems. I know
a University that has delayed a large roll out of BD 10Ks for several months
now due to stability issues. That aside, support is difficult at best.
There are no good discussion groups or lists for Extreme and configuration
guides and examples on the Extreme web site are practically non-existent.
Search google for an error in an Extreme switch log and you'll find nothing.
Do the same for Cisco and you'll find hundreds of hits. Extreme is cheaper
and they claim to be faster but IMO they do it at the expense of quality and
stability. They'll be first to market with many things but they often do not
work properly. Our Enterprise has decided that it's better to pay more
upfront for the reduced long term costs and reduced outage costs to the
business. Cisco has more people working on the 6500 platform alone than the
entire company at Extreme. I will give them credit for trying. They've gone
out of their way to work with us and try to provide a stable platform but
something always breaks again before long. We just had some line cards fail
just last week with no log errors, no failures in diagnostics, they just
stopped forwarding correctly. I can't tell you the number of times their
support people have said to us "we haven't seen that one before, that's a
new one." I don't mind the CLI but there are weird quirks. Do a show conf
with Extreme and paste it into a text file. You would think you can paste
this into a new switch to get a config going but nope. The order in show
conf is a different order than what needs to be entered to make a new
config. I was once under the gun to get a failed switch replaced and it took
me 30 minutes to paste things in the correct order from a text file backup.
With Cisco I could have pasted the new config in a minute. Just my
opinion...

Dennis




On 3/29/06, Scott Granados <sgranados at jeteye.com> wrote:
>
> I've got a couple points.
>
> Have you actually tried to configure an Extreme?  I didn't like the
> interface on the Black Diamond at all!  That is however the only one
> I've ever touched.  Ios is just preferable at least of the two.  Also,
> I'm sure extreme has a good community mailing list but as good as this
> one?  More than one time I've posted here and with in realistically ten
> minutes I've had 2 or 3 responses and to top that, they were correct.:)
> You can't beat the community support and that's not a trivial point.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
> [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Jon Smith
> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 3:01 PM
> To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
> Subject: [c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco
>
> I was wondering if anyone has any good comparison of cisco switches
> vs. extreme? Also any horror stories about extreme. I have used
> Cisco's products and like them very much, but need to argue to
> management that we don't need to go the Extreme way.
>
> Any thoughts would be appreciate it.
>
> --Jon
>
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