North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Force10 Gear - Opinions

  • From: Jo Rhett
  • Date: Mon Aug 25 19:20:20 2008

On Aug 23, 2008, at 10:52 PM, Paul Wall wrote:
EANTC did a comprehensive study of the E-series:

http://www.eantc.de/en/test_reports_presentations/test_reports/force_10_sfm_failover_video_ftos_6211.html

http://www.eantc.com/fileadmin/eantc/downloads/test_reports/2006-2008/Cisco-Force10/EANTC_Full_Report.pdf

http://www.eantc.com/fileadmin/eantc/downloads/test_reports/2006-2008/Cisco-Force10/Section_8.pdf

Did you read these? They appear to be nonsense. They were bought and paid for by Cisco, and including nonsense things like "if you leave a slot open the chassis will burn up" as a decrement, which is also true in pretty much every big iron vendor. They also deliberately detuned the force10 configuration. They re-ran the tests using the recommended configuration and got very different numbers -- which you can request from them, but they won't publish on the website.


I'm not trying to be a Force10 advocate here (although I like their stuff) so much as trying to point at an incredibly biased and non- vendor-neutral report. It is entirely funny the amount they tried to make nonsensical stuff sound important.

Comparing list pricing, it looks like Force 10 would have you pay more
for less features.

Based on what? For E and C series boxes, Cisco is never cheaper. S- series are a different story.


As a box designed with the enterprise datacenter in mind, the E-series
looks to be missing several key service provider features, including
MPLS and advanced control plane filtering/policing.


Ah, because Cisco does either of these in hardware?

--
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness