[AusNOG] Deciding on Juniper vs. Brocade

[Dave Finster]

We upgraded from our EX4200 units to EX4300s at our main corporate office once the cabling arrangements got out of hand in our server room. Both are good switches, but the 4200s didn’t come with any fibre options and could only 'virtual chassis’ with other 4200 units via a dedicated VCP channel on the back. We had three racks and were running quite long CAT6 cables from 2 of the racks into the one with the 4200s in them. We instead opted for a single EX4300 as a top of rack switch for the two server racks and 3 x EX4300 for end-user terminations. The two top-of-rack switches are connected back to the end-user switches by 10 gigabit optics (official Juniper) and the end-user switches are interconnected using the ports on the back. All 5 switches operate in a virtual chassis.

Both the 42 and 43 switches were flawless, but we just needed more flexibility with regard to optics. 

Any more questions feel free to ask.

> On 5 Aug 2014, at 4:03 pm, Peter Childs <pchilds at staff.iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
> 
> At a glance the EX4300 appears better in terms of everything (including value) than EX4200 ?    Am I missing something?  
> 
> (it appears ex4300 can not 'virtual chassis it with ex4200 devices, if that is important ..)
> 
> Be interesting in anyone's opinion that has 4300's in the field.
> 
> From: Christopher Pollock <chris at ionetworks.com.au <mailto:chris at ionetworks.com.au>>
> Date: Tuesday, 5 August 2014 3:12 pm
> To: Tom Storey <tom at snnap.net <mailto:tom at snnap.net>>
> Cc: "ausnog at lists.ausnog.net <mailto:ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net <mailto:ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>>
> Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Deciding on Juniper vs. Brocade
> 
> Hi Rhys,
> 
> Any reason you're looking at the EX3300/EX4300 over the 32/4200?  You may find them better value/featureset for your dollar.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Christopher Pollock,
> io Networks Pty Ltd.
> e. chris at ionetworks.com.au <mailto:chris at ionetworks.com.au>
> p. 1300 1 2 4 8 16
> d. 07 3188 7588
> m. 0410 747 765
> skype: christopherpollock
> twitter.com/chrisionetworks <http://twitter.com/chrisionetworks>
> http://www.ionetworks.com.au <http://www.ionetworks.com.au/>
> In-house, Outsourced.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 5:25 AM, Tom Storey <tom at snnap.net <mailto:tom at snnap.net>> wrote:
>> In my own personal experience, the Brocade CLI is Cisco like, but
>> annoyingly nothing like it. Sometimes what you instinctively think you
>> should be able to do, you cant. You cant assume a book has the same
>> contents based on its cover in this particular scenario, but I guess
>> like any other vendor its just a matter of learning the differences.
>> 
>> On 30 July 2014 18:27, Andy Davidson <andy at nosignal.org <mailto:andy at nosignal.org>> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 30 Jul 2014, at 04:15, Rhys Hanrahan <rhys at nexusone.com.au <mailto:rhys at nexusone.com.au>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'm looking for people's recommendations that could be given to pick one over the other, as I'm having a tough time deciding. Based on the technical specs, and feature listings of both sets of hardware, I can't find a major technical reason to pick one over the other - they are mostly pretty closely matched for what we need. So I'm more focused on trying to find out what people's experiences are generally, so I can get a "safety in numbers" sort of approach.
>> >
>> > We took 5 vendors through to a detailed drill down when we built the 100% fully automated wholesale carrier at www.allegro.net <http://www.allegro.net/> and Juniper had the most complete automation/api, so we went with those guys.  It’s good stuff.  We use netconf over ssh rather than their orchestration abstraction stuff (like Space) but I like it.
>> >
>> > Software reliability (we’re nowhere near bleeding edge) is good, hardware reliability is acceptable.
>> >
>> > Andy
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