[j-nsp] juniper-nsp Digest, Vol 83, Issue 1

[Chris Evans]

Quoc:
  "I'm considering purchasing the big iron EX8216 chassis for our core
switching. These switches are pretty brand new to the market. Anyone running
these and care to share their operational experience/feedback/issues seen so
far?

thanks,
quoc"

We have two of the 8216's in our lab as part of an RFI we're working on.. I
don't think we would/could use it in our production systems.. The main
reason for us is the power supply, which is the same issue why we can't
deploy the MX960's in our environment, it takes 5 power supplies to run the
8216 populated. In our power grid we have an A and B. Unfortunately with the
way this power is laid out we could never keep the system up when they data
center ops takes down one of the grids for maintenance. I think the 8208's
would be the sweet spot in the product porfolio at this point. I'm not sure
what you're real intention is for them, but for my company the EX series
still doesn't have the feature parity to be able to replace our Cisco
switching infrastructure. Price wise I like the EX series, its attractive
and will be even more so when they release some high density 10GE cards as
bring new features.

Another thing that shocked me with the 8216 is that it is a beast, its
HUGE.. It's almost as big as the Cisco Nexus 7010, only missing the size by
a few inches. It really needs to be installed in a 4 post rack, so that
might be an issue for some folks.

Not much info, but hope it helps in some ways.

Chris