sth...@nethelp.no wrote:
Rod Beck wrote:
What is EAPS?
A joke of a "standard" and something to be avoided at all costs. I would echo the last part about Extreme switches too.

Disagree. I don't believe anybody would claim EAPS is a "standard"
just because an RFC has been published.

Pannaway does. That was one of the very arguments I used against their product when they were brought in. They claimed that it was a standard because it had a RFC. I tried to explain the difference between an Information RFC and a Standards Track to no avail. Of course this also came from the Pannaway SE that gave me 3 quotes I repeat as often as possible to as many people as possible. He said:

1) that we didn't need to run an IGP across our network because we weren't big enough to need one. This was in response to my query about their lack of support for IS-IS. He said that he'd seen SP networks many times our size get by perfectly well with static routes.

2) that we didn't need QoS on our network if our links weren't saturated. I won't get into the holy war over serialization delay, micro bursts, and queuing here. It's been hashed out many times before on NANOG I'm sure.

3) that IPv6 was just a fad and that it would never be implemented in the US. I got our /32 in 2008 and am working on the deployment now. I'm certainly not breaking new ground here either. It may not be the most common thing in the US but it is picking up steam for everyone not running Pannaway products since they don't support IPv6 (the BASs and BARs that we ended up buying at least).

As for Extreme switches - they have their strengths and weaknesses,
just like any other product. We use lots of Summit X450/X450a, for
L2 only, and have been generally reasonably happy with them. If I
could buy a similarly featured product from Cisco, for a similar
price, I might well choose Cisco. But at least in our case Cisco
*doesn't* have a competitive product (case in point: ME3400 - too
few ports, too few MAC addresses, funky licensing even if you just
want to do simple QinQ).

I don't have any experience with the ME3400 unfortunately. A mix of vendors isn't a bad thing if you have the knowledge, depth and time to keep up with each of them so you can support the device adequately (adequate staffing is involved here too). When one buys a budget switch just to save a few bucks they tend to get what they paid for and none of what they didn't (training, experience for their staff, printed third-party references, reliable online support groups for example).

I'm in a situation right now where a vendor has proposed a basic L2 switch solution to redundantly connect 2 of our sites. They come in cheaper than the Cisco equivalent (4 4948-10GEs) but we also have absolutely no experience with that vendor. That means interopt testing, future finger pointing in the heat of an outage, double training staff, inevitable config errors and typos thanks to the differences between the vendor we're used to and the one that is being proposed for this one-off connection. The better fool-proof solution costs a bit more and I have to convince management not to save a short-term buck which costs of many long-term bucks. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

Justin



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