[Techtalk] Re: Somewhat OT: Fiberoptic networking HOWTO?

[Robert White]

> 	As per switches, I've had good luck with Alteons and with
> Extremes.  I honestly have not noticed a great performance difference
> with different sorts... manageability and interface friendliness, VLANs,
> features, et cetera are probably bigger considerations.  I'd need to
> know a *lot* more about your network and its design to make more
> specific recommendations than that, though.
> 
> Cheers,
> Raven

Ugh! Having had to support Extreme switches for the last year, I am not a
big fan. The shelf life for its backplane is something like 9 months, and
we've replaced the fan trays on all of our Alpine's at least once, and
several twice. Their hardware diagnostics are so bad that until the most
recent version of code, there wasn't much to troubleshoot. We just replaced
the SMMI or blade that was spewing errors.

And the best part was that when the switches died, they didn't do it in an
intelligent fashion. They would spiral downward, accepting traffic and then
sitting on it. We have to isolate it from the network through its external
connections or we soon have a blackhole where it sits.

Part of the issue is that we use them as Layer-3 devices. The Alpine's are
pretty bad, but the Summits are a bit more stable.

Rob