On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Greg VILLAIN <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mar 24, 2008, at 10:23 AM, user user wrote:
>
> Hi everybody!
>
> I find myself in the market for some 10GE routers. As
> I don't buy these everyday, I was wondering if any of
> you guys had any good resources for evaluating
> different vendors and models. I'm mainly thinking
> about non-vendor resources as the vendorspeak sites
> are not that hard to find.
>
> Also I'd love to hear recommendatios for "budget" 10GE
> routers. The "budget" router would be used to hook up
> client networks through one 10GE interface and connect
> to different transit providers through two 10GE
> interfaces.
>
> - Zed

Hiya,

When it comes to budget, force10 are good. I wouldn't be able to
confirm if they're worth performance-wise.
I'd strongly suggest Foundry, I'm a big fan of their kits, price-wise
and performance-wise, provided you do not need rocket-science features.
MLX/XMR models will surely do the trick perfectly.

When it comes to router purchasing habits, we all tend to get
religious...
Bottom line is that most of the 'regular' vendors (namely Cisco,
Juniper, Foundry, Force10, Extreme, Riverstone) implement pretty much
the same set of features, which are all IETF/IEEE normalized, meaning
if you don't need proprietary features (and you'll wish you don't),
any router will be fine, the only difference will come from:
- the chassis being non-blocking or not (i.e. backplane design)
- the price per port
- the operating OS
- the feeling you'll get with the salesperson, and the reputation of
their Support Teams.
- vendor specific features such as Flow Sampling
To make it simple, most vendors have an IOS like OS, except Juniper
which has a really clever and elegant OS, but are very pricey.
Foundry and Force10 have the cheapest price per port
Cisco does only Netflow, Foundry & Force10 only SFlow (which is a true
standard) and I think Juniper does JFlow
Cisco's kits are packed with proprietary protocols (HSRP and GLBP
instead of VRRP, their own ethernet trunking, EIGRP as their own and
yet extremely efficient IGP, TCL scriptable CLI...) , some of them are
really good, some are crappy, but I suggest you'd stick with IEEE/IETF
protocol to avoid future trouble.

One thing: RSTP/802-1w is very (very, very, very) not often
interoperable between vendors who all have their own interpretation of
the norm and can quickly turn into a nightmare.
I'd strongly suggest try&buys if (R)STP interoperability is required,
but I'm a little paranoid :)

Greg VILLAIN
Independant Network & Telco Architecture Consultant