Avaya Fabric Connect

OfWolfAndMan

Not sure how many people have heard of Avaya's Fabric Connect, but this was the tech used for the Olympics:

http://www.ashtonmetzler.com/Avaya%27s%20VENA%20Fabric%20Connect.pdf

SPB is pretty much Avaya's bread and butter, a L2 overlay technology essentially with some addons the other L2 overlays don't have, including native Multicast (With true multipath capabilities) and its own MPLS behavior (Not using MPLS tags). In addition, it uses I-SIDs for L2 isolation rather than VLANs, spanning up to 16,000,000 like VXLAN. As any L2 overlay, it uses IS-IS and its special TLVs to provide control plane information. The coolest part, aside from their Identity Engines stuff? Once you have the core setup, most all configurations are done at the edge. I know this is new to all the skeptics, but I'll let you know my experience as this is the way my company is steering right now. Some of it at least.

Kragster

That's pretty cool. Our avaya rep was talking about the SPB last time he was here but that PDF really gets into the benefits better. Unfortunately don't have money for switch upgrades this coming year (local government, gotta love it.) hoping to get some money to at least get core and datacenter switches upgraded next year though.

OfWolfAndMan

The VSP 9Ks are beasts. One can handle the load that 2+ 6509s could handle, but then you have to consider the size and weight of them compared to the standard Cisco chassis as well . I see IS-IS taking over as the L2 control plane in the next couple of years. Hopefully we can finally say goodbye to spanning tree.

philz1982

I sell quite a few avaya setups b/c of fabric connect and its ability to consolidate networks. I've also been seeing a ton of GPON due to its NPV on 30 year projects.

OfWolfAndMan

I enjoy the fact they keep the product line simple for switching. A 48 port, PoE stackable switch at the edge, one standard switch for DC ToR, and two different options for core switches depending on the size of the network. In a campus network, I think their stuff will do excellent in the next several years of adoption.

Kragster

Yeah, I was new to Avaya/Nortel networking gear when I started this job last year. Has been a bit of a learning curve coming from Cisco, but really haven't had any problems other then design issues inherited from some people who left.

And I noticed you mentioned Identity Engines, is your company actually using it? Another project that we inherited from the previous team (networking group lost 3 of 5 people before I got here) and I haven't been able to find many people using it in production.

OfWolfAndMan

Kragster wrote: »

Yeah, I was new to Avaya/Nortel networking gear when I started this job last year. Has been a bit of a learning curve coming from Cisco, but really haven't had any problems other then design issues inherited from some people who left.

And I noticed you mentioned Identity Engines, is your company actually using it? Another project that we inherited from the previous team (networking group lost 3 of 5 people before I got here) and I haven't been able to find many people using it in production.

Let me guess: Because they had a particular bias? No, we haven't implemented Identity Engines, but that is what they are looking to go to. It's one of the standards they have in the mix, along with replacing our wireless with Aruba and Fortigate for firewall.

I don't have any Nortel here, thankfully. However they still have a couple 3Com.

networker050184

I've been looking a bit at this, but convincing anyone of going for proprietary extensions from anyone but Cisco or Juniper (some Arista stuff starting to be more acceptable in the DC world too) is an extremely hard sell unfortunately. In the large provider space anyway.

Kragster

OfWolfAndMan wrote: »

Let me guess: Because they had a particular bias? No, we haven't implemented Identity Engines, but that is what they are looking to go to. It's one of the standards they have in the mix, along with replacing our wireless with Aruba and Fortigate for firewall.

I don't have any Nortel here, thankfully. However they still have a couple 3Com.

Lol, don't know the reasons. But I'd say the previous network manger loved complexity for it's own sake. The fun thing is learning new stuff while I've been undoing a lot of his design. Gotta admit some of the stuff is pretty cool, even if over-engineered.

Finding people that have even heard of Identity Engine is hard. We had some left-over pro-services money and were looking for help getting IDE implemented and couldn't find a vendor that could do it. The vendor is having to use Avaya Engineering Services. Supposed to have a project kick-off meeting nextweek. I just hope the engineer is an english speaker.

We're using Palo Alto for firewalls, and Ruckus for our wifi. I love the Palo Altos, Ruckus is ok.