[f-nsp] SLX 9640 experiences

[Jörg Kost]

Not on 9640, but on 9540s, but well about the SLX software itself.

I have found issues on monthly base and even one or two cases seem to be 
edge situation within the Broadcom SDK itself, and we are almost running 
KISS setups only. I have spent hours and days to debug and document 
issues as support cases, almost feeling the support fee shall be 
reversed - pay me instead of the vendor.

 From my (limited) personal point of view, there is a lack of allocated 
(or not merged) engineering or testing people or at least a big backlog, 
that affects identifying and fixing bugs et al.

Also AI & ML or cloud networking is their hot topic, but if they can't 
produce a decent device that is not reacting goofy the next minute after 
you changed a ACL, you might want head back to the white board and raise 
support for your engineering. Networking is not just about WLAN.

The idea and architecture about the SLX is fine and reasonable but 
currently it does not run smoothly and "round" like MLX.

On 3 Jun 2019, at 15:59, Aaron wrote:

> We have 2 of these.  They're based off the VDX platform, not the MLX 
> so there are some differences in the command syntax.  Nothing major 
> though.  For us they were not ready for production.  We found 3 bugs 
> right off the bat that have prevented us from using them.  A new 
> software version was released last week.  We'll be testing it 
> today.  Hopefully it'll do the trick because from the testing we've 
> done already they are little workhorses.  And really, for the price 
> they can't be beat.
>
> Aaron
>