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Frederic Jaeckel | 9 Jun 2010 13:15

experience with Force10 E300

Hi,

I'm looking forward to use the E300 as a BGP peering platform and I'm
wondering if someone already did that and maybe has some experiences to
share with me. Some sales guys and technicians told me "it's not mature
enough to do that!" - but I want a somewhat second opinion.

Rants and Praises welcome. :)

Cheers,
Frederic Jaeckel
Network Operator
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Niels Bakker | 9 Jun 2010 15:05

Re: experience with Force10 E300

* jchome <at> jc-ix.net (Frederic Jaeckel) [Wed 09 Jun 2010, 13:52 CEST]:
> I'm looking forward to use the E300 as a BGP peering platform and 
> I'm wondering if someone already did that and maybe has some 
> experiences to share with me. Some sales guys and technicians told 
> me "it's not mature enough to do that!" - but I want a somewhat 
> second opinion.

I have, it worked fine.  Like with every hybrid L2/L3 device on the 
market today, make sure you have enough CAM on your linecards to suit 
your purposes.

	-- Niels.

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Jo Rhett | 10 Jun 2010 01:20
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Re: experience with Force10 E300

On Jun 9, 2010, at 4:15 AM, Frederic Jaeckel wrote:
> I'm looking forward to use the E300 as a BGP peering platform and I'm
> wondering if someone already did that and maybe has some experiences to
> share with me. Some sales guys and technicians told me "it's not mature
> enough to do that!" - but I want a somewhat second opinion.

The "not mature" comment referred to the 6.x code.   It wasn't ready until 7.4 shipped, but has been fairly
solid since then.  (~3 years ago)

At $FORMER_EMPLOYER we deployed them and they worked very well until the CAMs filled up late last year.   F10
promised us adjustable CAM profiles but never delivered.  The Dual-CAM cards only provide a fairly short
lifetime based on post-exhaustion IP table growth, and for some wierd reason the Quad-CAM cards didn't
double the IPv4 tables, but only provided 120% of what you get in a dual-cam card.

$FORMER_EMPLOYER took this as a hint that F10 didn't have the resources to chase both the fast-switching
market and the IP Provider market, and had chosen to drop the service providers.

If you don't believe that IPv4 tables will break 600k prefixes before planned obsolescence in your
environment, I believe that are a solid platform at a good price point.

If you want a platform without those limitations (and already supports millions of prefixes) look at the
Juniper MX platform.

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