[e-nsp] Extreme switches inquiry and feedback

[Bruno Lebayle]

Samit wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am new member to this list. I am looking to purchase few metro line
> switches. I have 3 choices Extreme Summit X250a-24x series , Cisco
> Catalyst 3400ME and Foundry's FastIron FES-12-GCF. Being used to working
> in Cisco environment, it will be really a new experience for me to make
> a move towards Extreme products, therefore  just wanted to know your
> expert opinions about using extreme products (pros and cons) along with
> Cisco gears in a ISP network.

Hello,

Of course, being an Extreme customer, my list of pros is much longer! I 
would recommend that you take every item and compare between the 
different manufacturers. On one hand, I do not know Foundry well because 
we have tested a switch that had no out-of-band interface, and it was 
discarded immediately. On the other hand, I have used many Cisco 
products for long and you may recognize some of their flaws hereafter.

Pros:
- top performance - routing and filtering wirespeed
- stability of the firmware, i.e. versioning has a reasonable pace
- out-of-band management, fully separate from in-band
- CLI (a real bash)
- quality of the documentation
- Epicenter central management platform, really cool when it comes to 
managing several units: macros for list of commands to run in a ssh 
session with any subset of switches, checking which VLANs are where, 
locating IP/MAC, cron for backuping config files on a server, etc.
- recognizable color ;-)
- stacking (the stacking of Summit X is much more reliable than the 
stacking of the older Summit400 models)
- text files for configs (easier cross-checking and cloning)

Cons:
- Cisco is more trusted when it comes to technical support problems 
involving other manufacturers: we have solved this by using only Extreme ;-)
- SFlow collector not supplied

Being also a user of BlackDiamond chassis, some important pros were not 
listed above: in particular, hitless failover and hitless upgrade 
provided by the redundant supervision modules are very much appreciated.

Best regards,
Bruno LEBAYLE.
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