[AusNOG] Brocade experience

[Tom Lanyon]

On Wednesday, 24 September 2014 at 11:31, James Braunegg wrote:
> Dear Tom
> 
> I've been using the Brocade MLXe X platform since 2010, however if you are buying new hardware now and require full routes then do not buy the X buy the X2 which supports more routes !

Hi James,

Thanks for the reply.  We don't need a huge number of physical ports, and given the price of the 20-port 10GbE -X2 card compared to the 8-port -X series card, we're willing to sacrifice the extra FIB space!  We can upgrade to -X2 cards or start filtering in the year 2020 if the equipment is still in use and Geoff's predictions are reasonably accurate[1] :)
 
> I also highly recommend 3 switching fabrics and two managements cards per physical device.

Can you elaborate on this?  I assume you've had good success with the redundant cards taking over after failures?  Are there any software intricacies to look out for when running the redundant fabric and management cards?

Cheers,
Tom

[1] http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2014-01/bgp2013.html