[F10-nsp] experience with Force10 E300

[Jo Rhett]

On Jun 9, 2010, at 4:15 AM, Frederic Jaeckel wrote:
> I'm looking forward to use the E300 as a BGP peering platform and I'm
> wondering if someone already did that and maybe has some experiences to
> share with me. Some sales guys and technicians told me "it's not mature
> enough to do that!" - but I want a somewhat second opinion.

The "not mature" comment referred to the 6.x code.   It wasn't ready until 7.4 shipped, but has been fairly solid since then.  (~3 years ago)

At $FORMER_EMPLOYER we deployed them and they worked very well until the CAMs filled up late last year.   F10 promised us adjustable CAM profiles but never delivered.  The Dual-CAM cards only provide a fairly short lifetime based on post-exhaustion IP table growth, and for some wierd reason the Quad-CAM cards didn't double the IPv4 tables, but only provided 120% of what you get in a dual-cam card.

$FORMER_EMPLOYER took this as a hint that F10 didn't have the resources to chase both the fast-switching market and the IP Provider market, and had chosen to drop the service providers.

If you don't believe that IPv4 tables will break 600k prefixes before planned obsolescence in your environment, I believe that are a solid platform at a good price point.

If you want a platform without those limitations (and already supports millions of prefixes) look at the Juniper MX platform.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness