[c-nsp] Extreme vs. Cisco

[Gordon Smith]

One of the more interesting discussions to date  :-)

Our environment is that of a carrier, and we use both.
Basically, for wire-speed layer-2 switching over protected metro rings
we use Extreme.
For wire-speed routing in the network core, it's Juniper.
And on the edge of the network, it's mainly Cisco, because of the
excellent support for fractional interfaces.

It's not about being vendor-centric, it's all about picking the best
equipment for the task.

There's a lot of things I don't like about a lot of the equipment. E.g.
feature variations between versions in IOS in the same release train,
the way access-lists are implemented in Extremeware, the inflexibility
of prefix-lists in Junos

They all have their good and bad points. I have no problems getting a
Black Diamond to pass traffic at line rate. Conversely, try passing VoIP
traffic through a mid-range Cisco device and look at achievable
throughput (and CPU load). Full data frames are a different story - it
will do quite well.

The CLI differences across the different platforms take a bit of getting
used to, but that's about all. They all have their quirks. The only CLI
I really dislike would be that of the Lucent TNT boxes. If you've worked
on one, you'll know what I mean  :-)


Cheers,
Gordon