Needing an impartial answer - Cisco V Nortel switches 6

[Piloria]

We are looking at replacing our switch infrastructure (currently mix of cheep switches and Cisco 3560's)

we are looking to replace this with a more structured core/edge setup.
We have looked at
Cisco 3509's at the core with 3750's at the edge

and

Nortel 8310's with 4548's at the edge

The requirement at the edge is for stacks to connect via backplane rather than any layer 3 requirement.

Cost to us is a significant issue (pointing towards the Nortels) but if we go with the Nortel option is there anything we will be sacrificing?

if you have cisco skills do these easly transfer to the nortels?

Any useful comments?

 

[jeter]

Cisco and Nortel have different terminology, unless you are familiar with Nortel I would advise to go with Cisco or some other vendor....


SPC NVARNG
Tek-TIP Member 19,650

 

[DaddyOfThree]

Cisco and Nortel have different terminology, unless you are familiar with Nortel I would advise to go with Cisco or some other vendor.... "

Huh? I don't want to start a war here but this doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

I think you would be hard pressed to use that one-liner as an argument to a board on why you chose an option that might possible cost thousands of dollars more in the initial capital not to mention ongoing maintenance contracts.

If you're really interested in considering Nortel then speak with the reseller and have them bundle in some training. With any large project we always have the vendor bundle in training, be it on-site or be it traveling to the training center. I support both Cisco and Nortel products and don't really have any issues. Obviously the CLI syntax will be different but they will be similar enough that you can find your way around or hit up Google.

I personally think that Nortel has a great product for the enterprise customer. There is no doubt that Cisco has some great products, why else would they be #1 in the market place but they have gotten more than just a little greedy in my opinion. They've also been lagging behind with some of the enterprise features such as switch clustering (Nortel's Split MultiLink trunking) although it seems they are starting to catch up again.

Looking at the hardware it seems that the product lines aren't matching up. Is Cisco proposing the 3750G (10/100/1000Mbps) or the 3750 (10/100Mbps)? The Nortel ERS 4548 is 10/100/1000Mbps and both the Cisco and Nortel products stack which is a big plus. I don't believe there is a Cisco 3509, perhaps you meant a 6509E? The Nortel 8300 and Cisco 6509E are very similar in features and number of ports.

Have you looked at the different feature sets? What are you doing for voice? If you have a Nortel Meridian-1 PBX you might be able to leverage that to upgrade to a Succession 1000S/1000M platform.

Good Luck with your selection!

 

[Piloria]

Thanks for the reply
yes it was a 6509e
We have a Meridian Option 11 which is being upgraded.

The wish is Gig to the desk and price wise we can do this with the Nortel.

The nortel for an almost identical setup is about 50-60% the cost of the Cisco so any training can be covered by this.


As i have had no exposure to nortel switches up to this point i was looking for some clarity.

Thanks again

 

[jeter]

The fact of the matter is that Nortel and Cisco have good products... My comments above was that Cisco routers and switches have a common CLI and Nortel does not....

This making programming easier across the network...




SPC NVARNG
Tek-TIP Member 19,650

 

[anthonyanderberg]

As usual I'd agree with everything Daddy^3 has mentioned, and have a few additional thoughts...

First - are you sure you can cost-justify gigabit to the desktop? For 95% of my users 100Mbps is plenty much, especially with QoS to protect voice traffic. Even my power users don't often get effective use out of their gigabit connections most of the time. Of course servers in a network of any size should have fast connections, for server-to-server backups if nothing else. The reason I mention it is if you have $X available for network upgrades you might get a better end-result by spending that money on things like wireless coverage, WAN optimization, or load balancers. If your facing management perception this is also what the big industry consulting groups (Gartner, ect) are recommending.

If your workgroup switch configurations are straight-forward the interface won't matter much because you won't have to dig too deeply into the edge switches. In fact I think the Nortel menu-based interface that's used for most of the configuration is way easier than IOS command-line. A few years ago I did a big bake-off between Cisco/Nortel/Extreme/HP/AlliedTelesys/3Com/Foundry and thought that the IOS interface that I know and love on my WAN routers was a pain on a 6509 core switch with 200 ports. I didn't mind the Cisco products though, in the end it just came down to a substantial cost savings (as you note.)

As far as skills transfer I think you'll find that anyone who has a solid base of knowledge and understanding of networking will be fine, knowing what to look for is usually harder (and more important) than knowing where to find it.

 

[curtismo]

With Nortel switch line (at least the 5500 switches) I have multiple ways of setting up switches - choose what suits you the best -

- menu-based (I do 80-90 percent of my total switch setups through this interface); interface has been common through years of Nortel edge switches started at the 350/450, BPS, etc.

- CLI - for those of you that like a command-line interface; quick for things like large-scale VLAN assignments; also the most intuitive for setting up basic and advanced routing parameters

- HTTP - quick and dirty if you can't run telnet for some reason - most every menu-based system parameter is available through the web interface; downside is that it uses a Java-based menu structure, so a bit of overhead over slow-speed links

- SNMP Nortel Java Device Manager - free Nortel point-and-click utility for graphically setting up switch paramenters; I believe almost all parameters, including advanced routing (although I always use the CLI for setting up my OSPF interfaces, etc.)

 

[gwebster]

Not just upfront costs, but look at ongoing costs - especially power consumption.

 

[anthonyanderberg]

Its worth noting that the traditional BayStack menu-based interface is no longer present in the 2500/4500 line, which is too bad - as curtismo notes its the fastest way to do lots of simple things.

 

[CharlesBr]

Now, just for fun, try posting this in a cisco forum and see if you get a single mature answer