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Re: Force10 E300 vs. Juniper MX480

  • From: Chris Marlatt
  • Date: Fri Jul 18 10:52:52 2008
Keith O'neill wrote:
Force 10 is fine. I do suggest he go with the dual cam cards over the regular cards. I am not sure what Chris is talking about but I have used Force 10 for a long time, E, C and S series and have found it very stable. It will do everything you want and then some. The E300 is a good bang for the buck. Sure Foundry might be cheaper but I hear more complaining about Foundry than any other platform.

Chris you want to share what issues you have seen with Force 10.

Keith

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Marlatt" <[email protected]>
To: "Joe Abley" <[email protected]>
Cc: "nanog" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 7:43:33 AM (GMT-0500) America/New_York
Subject: Re: Force10 E300 vs. Juniper MX480

Joe Abley wrote:
Hi all,

An acquaintance who runs an ISP with an M7i on its border is looking to upgrade, because the M7i is starting to creak from all the flesh-tone MPEGs his customers are sharing. (How times have changed. Back when I was chasing packets, it was flesh-tone JPEGs.)

He's looking at the MX480 and the E300.

The MX480 is attractive because the M7i has been stable as a rock, and he's familiar with JUNOS.

The E300 is attractive because it's half the price of the MX480, and has the potential to hold layer-2 cards as well as layer-3 ports which makes the price per port much more reasonable than the MX480. But he has no experience with Force10 at any ISO layer higher than 2.

He doesn't have any exotic requirements beyond OSPF, OSPFv3, BGP, IP and IPv6. There's no MPLS in the picture, for example. However, he's going to want four or five full tables plus a moderate load of peering routes in there. And maybe VRRP.

Thoughts from people who have tried one or the other, or both? Or who have faced this kind of problem, and came up with a different answer?

Feel free to send mail off-list; I can summarise if there is interest.


Joe


I would avoid Force10 if at all possible. In the network I managed I've had some fairly surprising stability problems with their S series switches and feature problems (or lack there of) on their E series. Things you kind of scratch your head at and wonder what they were thinking. Juniper on the other hand is indeed a bit pricier but quite a stable platform. If he has to look at alternatives I would suggest Foundry, either the RX-8, MLX-8, or XMR-8000 (depending on requirements) for comparable models to the MX480.

Regards,

Chris



Considering I just had another issue pop up sure - I'd be glad to at this point.

As provided to another member who contacted me off list:
==========================================================
The S series problems were the worst - customer facing issues. <--snip-->. The list is noted in SFTOS and FTOS. Our design required layer 3 code on the S50N which "caused" some of these errors to present themselves:

- SFTOS: Limit of 8 ACL's (total ACL line count). Secondary assignments on the switch were "unprotected".

- SFTOS: OSPF required a specific ACL to form an adjacency even with a "default allow".

- SFTOS: If an uplink went down with OSPF running (ECMP) when the link was brought back up the OSPF adjacency would only form half way but would add a route. A 50/50 chance of success was the result.

- SFTOS: A "Transient Parity Error" crashed one of the S50's in production. No known cause.

- FTOS: The switch would lock during certain ARP operations (i.e. port flap). A hard reboot was necessary to recover the switch. <--snip-->

- FTOS: Random reboots preceded by "Low memory" errors. Our design would not / could not have consumed all the switch memory.

- FTOS: An upgrade from SFTOS to FTOS changes all the SNMP interface indexes causing lots of internal software to no longer be able to poll switch ports or monitor accurately.

- FTOS: Hard lock of the switch after an STP root change. The root change was not seen on any other switches (i.e. another bug in the S50 code) and there were no events that should have caused a change in the topology.

The E series has more stable but like I said lacking some features. The most notable is the inability to do "normal" PBR. Pretty much any BGP attribute can't be used to build a policy. We were forced to dedicate vlans to certain policies as they could only match the traffic via an interface.

A minor annoyance is the timing for the management cpu causing ping times to look as though there is something wrong with the router. There's a paper out there somewhere explaining the cause for this and it has to do with the polling cycles of the board.

A snippet of a ping to a routing interface:
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=4 ttl=252 time=0.640 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=5 ttl=252 time=5.376 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=6 ttl=252 time=12.170 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=7 ttl=252 time=1.106 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=8 ttl=252 time=8.089 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=9 ttl=252 time=0.715 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=10 ttl=252 time=3.758 ms
64 bytes from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: icmp_seq=11 ttl=252 time=10.636 ms

The only other problem we've had with the E series is a BGP failure. The device failed over to its standby management module so the impact was limited. I don't hold that too much against them as I realize that no vendor is perfect. However the vast problems we've had with the S series and minor problems with the E bring into question the stability and unseen bugs with other software. <--snip-->

Hopefully the above is helpful. I'm sure my experience isn't unique or the norm. If everyone was having issues similar to mine they'd be out of business.
==========================================================

The most recent problem occuring today:
%FIB6-2-FIB6_HW_WRITE_ERROR: Failed to write entry into Host table.

Had to clear the fib in order to get communication with that host back up.

Of all the vendors I've worked with this is by _far_ the longest list of issues I've ever come across. I'm glad that you're having better success than I am. Believe me I wish I was in the same boat.

We've been using Foundry for a much longer period of time than we have Force10 and in comparison I personally no longer consider them comparable products.

Regards,

Chris