Black Diamond 6800 vs Nortel PP8600 1

[Whitebellybob]

I have to make a decision to accept a bid from extreme or from nortel. We have a large campus with 2 core rooms and 28 telecom rooms, servicing 1,300 clients. Does anyone have any comments that would help me? Which hardware is more reliable, if you have Extreme would you switch your switches?

We are a Cisco shop now and no one on my staff have any experiance with Extreme or Nortel.

Tks

Southwest FL International Airport

 

[elotek]

Purple boxes all are piece of crap...if you have no cost issues, I suggest that you stick with Cisco...

 

[lgarner]

if you have Extreme would you switch your switches?"

Absolutely. We've had serious issues with our Black Diamond 6808 and our Summit48 switches. The BD had to have *both* MMC's replaced to avoid packet corruption, and the Summits frequently become non-responsive. We have replaced several with refurbished equipment. All new switch purchases are Cisco.

Extreme will never again be part of a network that I control. I proposed Extreme originally and wound up with a lot of egg on my face.

Plus, if you're a Cisco shop it's less of a learning curve, though the Exreme and Cisco command interface are similar.

 

[johnny99]

It's a little funny because we are now in our fourth year with Extreme switches. We have a BD6806/MSM64 with 64 Gbit ports and 24 summit24e
Except for one fault on the BD6808 after a major power problem in the city we have had no problem with them at all.

I have never used Nortel so I can't help you out on that.

Personaly I think I would run with Extreme again the next time.

/johnny

 

[volleyman]

I am a network engineer for a major pharmaceutical company. We are using all extreme gear for all LAN switching, we are using BDs, Alpines, and Summits in various configurations.

I would highly recommend not choosing Extreme as a solution. We originally chose them for simple throughput performance. Cost was similar to proposals from Nortel and Cisco. We had no first-hand experience on reliability.

Reliability became a critical factor. We RMA on the average of 15 cards per week. Some MMCs, some fiber cards, some copper cards. The reliability problems seem to span the entire product line.

We have a massive stock of equipment and a support contract that covers absolutely everything, so getting them replaced hasn't been an issue thus far. For shops that can't afford to maintain $1 Million worth of extra stock parts, you would be in big trouble!!!

 

[rn4it]

volleyman, I'm sorry about your luck with Extreme gear. We have a couple BD's and apprx 30 summits48's both iseries and regular. I agree, that we had a time where we had some issues with the blades. During the course of 5years with Extreme gear, we have had to replace a couple summits and maybe 6 or 7 blades a couple msms's. We have talked with our SE and he has worked with us. There was a version of blades that had some bad memory modules, we had them swapped out prior to a problem. If your having that much problem, I would be doing 2 things 1- Confirm that there are no evironmental issues with where this eqipment is. We had some issues once with cable runs being cut during construction which caused problems as well an issue where are racks wheren't grounded this caused a number of problems. If this is all in order I'd be contacting the SE and Sales Rep to have them correct the issue. Let's face if everyone had similar issues Extreme would not be in business. I'm not promoting or condeming Extreme. We have had our share of problems, but I've had similiar problems with 3Com, Cisco, Netscreen, Nokia etc.

 

[robbieguy2003]

We run a Mix of Cisco and Extreme (Cisco for all Routing) and the 6808s just for basic switching (with vlans etc).

The 6808s have caused quite a few problems but we're still working with them. We have about 3 months to get them nice and reliable otherwise there going to be swapped out for Cisco 6500's which run much better in my experience.

I wish someone would just call me Sir, without adding 'Your making a scene'.

Rob

 

[rn4it]

robbieguy2003,
What extremeware version are you running? We're currently on 7.2 and they have been very stable. We have multiple vlans using ESRP and OSPF for load balancing and redundancy.

 

[robbieguy2003]

rn4it,

there currently on an older 6. release (very old), we're planning to get them upgraded over the next week and then with some luck they should stable out.

We're guessing the problem isnt down to faulty hardware as the lock ups are intermittent (ie, not during high traffic loads, random times etc).

Sometimes the crashed only take certain blades out, we've swapped the cards out (all i series & MSM64i management cards) so the last thing left now is the firmware (possibly the most obvious thing).

I like Cisco equipment but in raw layer2 switching performance the Extreme Series does seem better than similar Cisco kit.

I wish someone would just call me Sir, without adding 'Your making a scene'.

Rob

 

[robbieguy2003]

Its running on 6.1.4 (really old so probrably the problem)

I wish someone would just call me Sir, without adding 'Your making a scene'.

Rob