[c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco

[William S. Duncanson]

We've also seen issues with performance not coming anywhere close to line
rate when you start doing GEC.  I've seen a 6500 (Sup720's, 6516's) push
traffic on an eight port GEC at 94%+ of line rate; the one Black Diamond
I've worked with (6808) wasn't able to even come close to that. 

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Dave Temkin
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:03 AM
To: Drew Weaver
Cc: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco

Agreed.  And as anyone who's been a Yipes customer can tell you, Extreme's
do not handle MAC/CAM table management well.

There's been numerous instances of their network being brought to it's knees
from issues with customers exposing their forwarding tables to the
network and then bringing core devices down...   They do have EAPS, which
is nice, but if you don't need it their spanning tree is kind of mediocre.

Also have seen issues with multicast forwarding across them, but this may
have been more of a network design issue.

-Dave


On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Drew Weaver wrote:

>
> On 3/29/06, Jon Smith <netguyster at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
>
> The rhyme is "Extreme is trouble free until layer three".
>
> 	It all depends on your environment, the number of entries in your 
> forwarding information database, and the version of software you're 
> running, Also the version of modules, and the platform (summit, 6808..
> et cetera) plays a big role however, the point is many of the factors 
> wouldn't matter if it were a well developed piece of equipment. To the 
> environment end, I'd say that if you were an organization such as a 
> hospital, an office building, or another sort of company which can 
> control the type of packets flowing in and out of it; then it could 
> possibly suit your needs, however it is not suitable for any sort of 
> hosting environment where you must 24/7 be able to take whatever 
> anyone throws at you.
>
> 	Secondly, the forwarding database issue; the forwarding database on 
> the extremes is limited because it directly taxes the CPU and if you 
> are dealing with a large number of prefixes (destinations and or 
> source
> addresses) you will run into issues unless you aggregate or use 
> proprietary extreme commands to "limit the number of prefixes the CPU 
> will deal with" this again is due to poor design on the software and 
> hardware end of things. About a year ago we made a conscious decision 
> to stop using Extreme gear and migrate to Cisco Catalyst 6500s. We 
> have since started mixing 6500s and 4000s (Sup720s and SupVs) in 
> different places, and we couldn't be happier.
>
> Some of the other random issues we had with the black diamonds are.
>
> --pretty much everything is handled by the CPU so when people are 
> doing "performance testing" against your network it always appears to 
> be slower than it is (ICMP, etc) [We all know that pings are not a 
> sign of performance, but to many hosting customers, this is what they 
> go on.]
>
> --The amount of PPS the black diamond (at least the 6808) can handle 
> before performance degradation at Layer3 is somewhat low.
>
> --VOIP, Gaming, and any sort of application which employs UDP showed 
> significant loss compared to similar tests using Catalysts.
>
> 	That is my summary of our experience with Black Diamonds in Layer3, 
> as I said we still employ the exact same units in Layer2 and they work 
> beautifully as forwarders.
>
> FWIW,
>
> -Drew
>
>
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