What Devices do you use in your core.

In the core of your network what manufactures do you use.

Currently in mine I have CISCO, HP/3COM, Brocade, + others.

I am putting together a proposal to move to fully CISCO.

But I was just wondering what do other people use in there core and what size networks is it supporting.

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

vCole

Cisco Nexus routers and switches. (5K & 7K's)

NinjaBoy

The core of my network is HP, not the rebranded 3Com stuff. We do have a Cisco router, but I don't consider that part of the core.

That reminds me, I have to replace it next year

DevilWAH

So if people had the choice starting from scratch for a site with 30 buildings and 500+ users, what gear would be you first choice ?

I know cisco so well and like the interface and range of technologies they offer, as far as I can see while Juniper and HP do some good products, they dont have the complete solution Cisco can provide. LAN, WAN, Wireless, VoIP, data center...

WafflesAndRootbeer

Most of the stuff I'm seeing these days is pure Cisco. It's just easier to deal with in this area because we have so many Cisco partners servicing both government and private data centers.

shodown

currently 6500's at large sites, 4500's at medium sites and 3750's at small sites.

Last in house job was ASR's

Job before that was Juniper M320's

NinjaBoy

DevilWAH wrote: »

So if people had the choice starting from scratch for a site with 30 buildings and 500+ users, what gear would be you first choice ?

I know cisco so well and like the interface and range of technologies they offer, as far as I can see while Juniper and HP do some good products, they dont have the complete solution Cisco can provide. LAN, WAN, Wireless, VoIP, data center...

Depends on the budget you have access to use...

DevilWAH

NinjaBoy wrote: »

Depends on the budget you have access to use...

I am thinking in terms of preferred manufacture / equipment, taking cost out of the equation. If some one handed you a blank check, what would you spend it on

deth1k

Juniper T1600, started migration onto T4000. Cisco on the edge where it belongs :P

DevilWAH

deth1k wrote: »

Juniper T1600, started migration onto T4000. Cisco on the edge where it belongs :P

I thinking possible a T4000 might be an over kill for what I had in mind.. However

While I have played with Juniper routers and while the CLI takes a bit to get use to I can deffetntly see why they have got such a good name. I don't know much about the rest of there products, We have some Trapeze wireless equipment that they have now brought, but unless they have done a lot to it since the take over it seems very basic.

Its the same with HP, there Switches are half decent bits of kit, but what about the rest of their network line up.

Becasue this is a medium size set up, and one person looking after it all, I don't want company X's routers, Y's switches, Z's wireless, W's phones. I would much rather a single company for all. And from what I see here

Cisco is clearly in the lead, with the only other 2 worth looking in to are HP and Juniper.

kj0

We just took delivery and set up 5 HP 5820's as our Center Stack (Core) and also HP A5500's at the edges. We have been running H3C 3650(Would have to double check that) as our WAPs with a WX1200 Controller. Our router is currently a 3com but is due for an upgrade becuase it can't handle 50Mbit, only 20Mbit. Which we are looking at a Cisco or a H3c.

VAHokie56

We run 6500's for all policy,core & distribution at larger sites...some smaller ones still have 6500's but they are more of a "collapsed core" really. Remote sites are typically just an edge router and some switches nothing real fancy. Our data centers are running nexus switches but I don't touch those as much.

NightShade1

We use Alcatel
a 6850...

Zartanasaurus

All Cisco. Cat6509, Nexus 7K.

unclerico

DevilWAH wrote: »

So if people had the choice starting from scratch for a site with 30 buildings and 500+ users, what gear would be you first choice ?

I know cisco so well and like the interface and range of technologies they offer, as far as I can see while Juniper and HP do some good products, they dont have the complete solution Cisco can provide. LAN, WAN, Wireless, VoIP, data center...

I can't look at it like that. IMHO I want the best of breed in all areas and so just because Cisco may offer an end-to-end solution, it doesn't mean they are the best in each area. My core involves Juniper switches, Cisco routers, Palo Alto for firewalls. As I said, this is just my opinion...

DevilWAH

unclerico wrote: »

IMHO I want the best of breed in all areas and so just because Cisco may offer an end-to-end solution, it doesn't mean they are the best in each area. My core involves Juniper switches, Cisco routers, Palo Alto for firewalls. As I said, this is just my opinion...

What made you chose juniper switches over Cisco.

I appreciate the idea of best of breed, but the problem with that is introducing compatibly issues and increasing complexity of management. Which could lead to a less flexible core. My view is that a product has to offers a signification and usable advantage to consider breaking away from the standard, other wise every device would be a different manufacture and model. At the level of the CISCOs and Junipers best of breed is a personal opinion.

But I am interested in the original question, Having worked with CISCO and JUNIPER I found very little difference (Apart from the interface) between there routers. Nothing that would have made me want to break away from a single manufacture, I would be happy with either. So what does make a Juniper Switch better than a CISCO? At this level it can't be simply speed as they are so close. What other factors determine which one is "best of breed"

4_lom

Cisco routers and some HP switches

Shanman

We are running Cisco through-out most of the infrastructure and core but we do have some 3coms kicking around in some remote locations. As far as our virtualization environment we went with Juniper mostly because of price. I would have preferred Cisco but this was not my choice and I inherited it. The older 3coms are going to be phased out this fall with the VoIP project I am working on to Cisco.

On the plus side I am forced to learn Juniper. It is never a bad thing in my view to learn new technologies.

DevilWAH

Shanman wrote: »

It is never a bad thing in my view to learn new technologies.

very very true

QHalo

Nexus will be our new cores.

deth1k

DevilWAH wrote: »

I thinking possible a T4000 might be an over kill for what I had in mind.. However

While I have played with Juniper routers and while the CLI takes a bit to get use to I can deffetntly see why they have got such a good name. I don't know much about the rest of there products, We have some Trapeze wireless equipment that they have now brought, but unless they have done a lot to it since the take over it seems very basic.

Its the same with HP, there Switches are half decent bits of kit, but what about the rest of their network line up.

Becasue this is a medium size set up, and one person looking after it all, I don't want company X's routers, Y's switches, Z's wireless, W's phones. I would much rather a single company for all. And from what I see here

Cisco is clearly in the lead, with the only other 2 worth looking in to are HP and Juniper.

Well T4000 are actual backbone, core / aggregation are Junipers MX960 Migrated from T320s and Cisco 7609, access comprises of Alcatel Licent ESS7 7450s and SR-12 7750s. If we are talking about enterprise type core i think Cisco are definetely in the lead with HP slightly behind as far as switches go although i wouldn't touch them personally.

DevilWAH

Just coming back to this briefly.

HP will go on about very high throughput capacity, along with banging on about virtual switches (VSS) in the Cisco world.

But in terms of real feature set how do CISCO and HP stand up to each other, both in terms of claimed features and how they have been implemented.

for example when applying a ACL to a VLAN on a hp/3com switch I found it was a static command, and that ports added to the VLAN at a later point do not automaticly take on the config.

From my current experience in HP I just get the feeling that while HP rave on about the amazing features, he actually implementation of this is going to be a pain and half of them will be incomplete. Causing a lot of hair pulling, and frustration.

Mrock4

Great features are one thing, but finding a qualified workforce to support those features..is another....hundreds of thousands of Cisco certified individuals out there.

it_consultant

You and I have sparred about this in the past - we converted a Cisco/HP network entirely to Brocade and we couldn't be happier. The idea that other manufacturers don't have a complete portfolio is not really accurate. The question is whether you are willing to break your Cisco habit, it is clear you don't really want too. Juniper will come in with more features at a lower year over year price (not to mention lower acquisition costs) and deliver the same or better performance than Cisco. We haven't even gotten to specialized networking equipment like Arista or Avaya...

The sad truth is; you could put some Dells (not even the rebranded Force 10 stuff they bought) and you would probably get quite decent performance out of them. The considerations that I think are most important is the convergence of ethernet and storage traffic and/or whether you ever intend to use an ethernet fabric.

If you are going to use an ethernet fabric you can go Avaya, Cisco Nexus, Juniper, or Brocade VCS. I would disqualify Juniper because their Fabric Path requires a director switch which makes the set up quite complex. If you want an ethernet fabric and FC storage convergence your choices narrow to Cisco Nexus with Cisco FC switches or Brocade IP/FC (the VDX line has FC and IP in the same chassis) and Brocade converged HBAs.

I say all that but I argue the point that you should have the same manufacturer for your whole network, seeing as though the management of most network devices is quite similar. I know Lockheed internal IT (at least here in Denver) ripped out their Cisco switching architecture for a Brocade and Juniper set up. Brocade Network Adviser is capably of managing Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade products.

f0rgiv3n

NO! NOT DELLS! *ahem* sorry, I've had a horrible experience with dell switches... very clunky.

I would like to say Extreme networks is an underdog but their gear is very under-rated, miss my Blackdiamond 8810

. I replaced an ooold core 3com switch with a Blackdiamond 8810 at one of my previous employers and that thing was a beauty... Quite literally, it was purple and green. Oh yeah, and you could plug network cables into it too.... :P . I ended up going with the BD8810 after receiving a Cisco 4510 and finding out after-the-fact that you couldn't put any of the newest line cards in slots 8-10.

Anyways, just thought I'd throw in there Extreme networks rocks!!!!

it_consultant

Extreme is pretty good. Sorry, I am disgruntled because I had to replace a Cisco 3900 voice gateway on smartnet Weds night because after certain PRI utilization it started bouncing calls off for no reason. Ad tran, ad tran, ad tran, Avaya, Ad tran...one of these days I will convert this organization.

DevilWAH

I don't think you should have single vendor networks, although I do think it is a reasonable idea to consider single vendors at each layer with in a site.
The only reason for that is that you generally configure features between devices at the same layer, so having 4 different vendors each with there own way of implementing a standard feature you have more chance of incompatibility issues and more time is spent designing the configuration (Looking in to 4 ways of doing the same thing) and while this may only be in terms of an extra few hours here and there. mutiplied up and factoring in cost of my time and it can soon overhaul the savings or a multiple vendor solution.

but worse I think that multiple vendors is the inconsistencies with in the same vendor. As I was saying with my HP kit different OS versions on teh same hardware or different models of switches have different commands. This makes setting up a network a pain as you can't copy and past config and there is a higher danger of mistakes.

As for brocade I am considering them as the server / data center switches.

This thread was purely around the core devices, not access or data-center distribution. Once the core is complete I will be looking at each of these in turn.

PS I hate management software, Monitoring yes great, but management you always find some thing it does not support and half the time this then means it puts restrictions on other areas. If your network is large enough and you have the resorces of manpower to manage the management software it can be great. but for small to mid size organisations that have very dynamic requirements they are more hassle than they are worth.

it_consultant

The main reason we didn't run Cisco Nexus in our core is that we wanted harmony with the storage side. Our SAN guy was not enthusiastic about the MDS line from Cisco. That and the Nexus line was outrageous expensive compared to the VDX line of the same general spec. We still have 4 cisco routers which aren't going anywhere - despite my best efforts at getting us migrated to ad tran