Big Three: Best Data Center Solution...or Combination?
Hey everyone. So seeing that I'm doing a pretty decent job in my current network engineering gig, my bosses decided to assign me to our "Cloud" team. Basically I'm doing a single-site, green field install for one of several private cloud sites for the government customer we support. So I've got a large number of 10-GigE port requirements for multiple network enclaves @ L2.
Since I don't have a lot of data center architecture experience (I'm limited to enterprise Edge and Campus LAN), I was wondering what you folks thought of the Big Three solutions: Cisco Fabric Path, Brocade VCS Fabric, or Juniper's Q-Fabric. We'll be using Cisco ASR as CE to our Core for a number of "political" reasons, but anything else below that is fair game. My two largest concerns are ease of maintenance (operations is NOT engineering) and scalability/flexibility over time.
Any takers?! Thanks for any info!
Since I don't have a lot of data center architecture experience (I'm limited to enterprise Edge and Campus LAN), I was wondering what you folks thought of the Big Three solutions: Cisco Fabric Path, Brocade VCS Fabric, or Juniper's Q-Fabric. We'll be using Cisco ASR as CE to our Core for a number of "political" reasons, but anything else below that is fair game. My two largest concerns are ease of maintenance (operations is NOT engineering) and scalability/flexibility over time.
Any takers?! Thanks for any info!
Reloaded~4~Ever
Comments
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higherho
Member Posts: 882
Were using Junipers 4500's 10 GIG SFP's and Juniper 4200's (for any access layer / 1 GIG connections) with 10 GIG uplink spf slots and VC cables connecting some of our 4500's. Some bonding going on as well. The backend is built for our big-data (Hadoop) enterprise application. We would have went with Cisco but Juniper was cheaper. I'm starting to like Junos OS a little bit more than Cisco's (still a pain remembering all the commands though).
In terms of protocols for our sake we use OSPFv3 and Layer 3 links when needed (SVI ports). Our backend (Production and Lab) were built to handle Petabytes of data going through it. -
it_consultant
Member Posts: 1,903
As far as an ethernet fabric (using TRILL or SPB) you only have two real choices, Brocade and Cisco. Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya (I suspect Avaya is OEM'ing someone) are the other major ethernet fabric vendor but I don't think that they are in your wheelhouse.
I use VDX 6730s and 6710s in our Fabric [through Brocade] and they are fine. I chose them over Cisco because a large cloud provider here in Denver uses them as well and their impression was that with Cisco they would have just paid 30% more for the same capability. If you are going to bet your company on using iSCSI then you must have a multiple uplink Ethernet fabric. Waiting on RSTP re-convergence is too slow for applications with transactional databases. If you will use a traditional FC architecture, you don't really need a fabric and you can save yourself some money and get traditional ethernet switches.