[107087] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Force10 Gear - Opinions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Wall)
Tue Aug 26 03:26:13 2008
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:26:05 -0400
From: "Paul Wall" <pauldotwall@gmail.com>
To: "Jo Rhett" <jrhett@netconsonance.com>
In-Reply-To: <F8A8A372-57DF-4EA9-88DD-B7E5BA32E5E2@netconsonance.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Jo Rhett <jrhett@netconsonance.com> wrote:
>> 1) Reliability
>
> Very good. Across our entire business we've lost 1 RPM module in ~2 years.
How many boxes in total? Losing a single routing engine in two years
is not a bad MTBF, though I wonder if we're talking about one chassis
or one thousand.
>> 2) Performance
>
> [Note: we have no 10g interfaces, so I can only speak to a many-singleg-port
> environment]
> Much higher than Cisco. So good at dealing with traffic problems that we
> have had multi-gig DoS attacks that we wouldn't have known about without
> having an IDS running on a mirroring port.
Routing n*GE at line rate isn't difficult these days, even with all
64-byte packets and other "DoS" conditions.
Linksys, D-Link, SMC, etc are able to pull it off on the layer 3
switches sold at Fry's for a couple benjamins a pop. :)
Now mind you, this is all traffic through the router. I'd imagine
Force 10 would have a problem with traffic aimed at its interface or
loopback IPs, given their lack of control plane policing/filtering,
unlike say:
http://aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu/papers/copp.html
>> 3) Support staff (how knowledgeable are they?)
>
> Significantly higher than Cisco, and escalation is easier. On par with
> Juniper.
This is good, though not necessarily hard when you have a small pool
of TAC people.
Then again, I've always had a good support experience with Extreme,
but I'm not about to run out and replace my core with Black Diamonds.
:)
> These things are so very solid that I rarely spend any time doing network
> work any more. Gigabit line-speed BCP38 makes life easier for the abuse
> helpdesk too.
I'm unaware of any hardware-forwarding-based platforms which can't do this.
Though if I find any, I'll be sure to steer clear!
Paul Wall
