[c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 05:01:10PM -0600, Jon Smith 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.

Every vendor has their horror stories, in fact I'm sure there are way more 
horror stories about Cisco just based on the volume of (crappy) products 
Cisco has put out over the years.

To give some general recommendations, an Extreme Summit running L2 only is 
one of the more stable and rock solid switches available (not to mention 
damn cheap if you go to the right places). I've had many many many classic 
summits, i and non-i series, run non-stop for years under a decent amount 
of load without so much as blinking (until eventually the power supplies 
fail :P). They've actually had some fairly interesting products over time 
as well, things like the old 2U 6-port GE-SX 16-port 10/100 Summit 4's 
(very compelling for small POPs especially when you can pick them up for 
cheap), and the 32-port GE Summit 7i (one of the only "cheap" older 
switches on the market that can reliably do L3/L4 link-agg hashing, jumbo 
frames, and has GBIC support).

Extreme at L3 however is an unmitigated disaster. If you're thinking of 
trying this, the answer is DON'T. Also the modular chassis boxes tend to 
be a lot less reliable than the summits, many more hw failures there. I've 
also played with the new XOS stuff, it's a good direction for them to be 
going but still suffers from a few early implementation issues. From a 
user perspective its exactly the same (or slightly worse, missing some 
stuff in the terminal friendly department), but there are still a few bugs 
to work out with the new hw/sw. For example the most annoying issue I've 
hit so far is crashing the box if you try to swap the SFPs too quickly. :)

But of course Extreme's biggest flaw IMHO is the horrible horrible CLI. 
This thing sends new users running the other direction (and rightfully 
so), especially at L3. If you actually take a little bit of time to learn 
the CLI, you'll be able to use at at L2 just fine, and in fact eventually 
it will start to make a little bit of sense... But there is just no 
covering for it at L3, it's bad.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)