[AusNOG] Deciding on Juniper vs. Brocade

[Rhys Hanrahan]

Hi All,


I'm currently looking at some new hardware to upgrade our network. I've narrowed my selection down to two sets of hardware, from either Juniper or Brocade. I don't have experience with either vendor, otherwise it would be a fairly straight-forward selection process for me. Most of my dealings have been with Cisco IOS, but am expecting to have to learn a new CLI, and I'm not particularly attached to IOS, so that's fine.


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.


I'm looking for any feedback in a few key areas (or anywhere you deem relevant):


- Overall hardware stability / reliability


- Reliability of software - looking to stack some of the switches, so any lessons learned there would be of particular interest.


- Documentation - Cisco seems unparalleled in the amount of blog posts and other articles you can find online regarding various things. JunOS seems to have a fair bit as well, but not sure about Brocade. Brocade's similarity to IOS could be a plus here (or it may be unwise to rely on that at all).


- Training / Knowledge - As much as it seems to me that any network engineer would be able to transition between OS's relatively easily, I'm thinking that in general it would be advantageous to use a platform more widely used. Though it seems like both vendors are quite popular.


- Config Automation / Orchestration (though this is not necessarily a deal-breaker)


Here are the two sets of hardware I'm currently looking at:


Juniper


- 2xEX4300-32F for core switches (stacked).

- 2xEX3300-48T per rack for ToR (stacked).


Brocade


- 2x ICX6610-24-PE for core switches (stacked).

- 2x ICX6450-48 per rack for ToR (stacked).

- 1x ICX6450-C12 (for 1G/100M SFP ports).


For our router platform I'm looking at virtual routers - either Brocade's vRouter (which is strikingly similar to JunOS, to me), or Juniper's Firefly Perimeter.


Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide!

Rhys Hanrahan
Chief Information Officer
Nexus One Pty Ltd

E: support at nexusone.com.au<mailto:support at nexusone.com.au>
P: +61 2 9191 0606
W: http://www.nexusone.com.au/
M: PO Box 127, Royal Exchange NSW 1225
A: Level 10 307 Pitt St, Sydney NSW 2000

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