Force10 Gear - Opinions

[pauldotwall at gmail.com (Paul Wall)]

Jo Rhett wrote:
> Note the "not random" comment.  People love to use the random feature of ixia/etc but it rarely displays
> actual performance in a production network.

Once upon a time, vendors released products which relied on CPU-based
"flow" setup.  Certain vintages of Cisco, Extreme, Foundry,
Riverstone, etc come to mind.  These could forward at "line rate"
under normal conditions. Sufficient randomization on the sources
and/or destinations (DDoS, Windows worm, portscans, ...) and they'd
die a spectacular death.  Nowadays, this is less of a concern, as the
higher-end boxes can program a full routing table (and then some)
worth of prefixes in CAM.

Either way, I think it's a good test metric.  I'd be interested in
hearing of why you think that's not the case.  Back on topic, doing a
couple of gigs of traffic at line rate is a walk in the park for any
modern product billed as a "layer 3 switch".  The differentiator
between, say, a Dell and a Cisco, is in the software and profoundly
not the forwarding performance.

Jo Rhett wrote:
>> No, $65000.00 vs $62240.00.
>
> I have a current spreadsheet here, and trust me your math went wrong
> somewhere.  A completely full chassis is only a bit more than what you are
> quoting (at list) and the chassis itself is practically free.
>
> But no, I'm not going to redo the math.  I'm not a F10 salesperson and I
> have much more important things to do right now.

I'd be interested in seeing where I went "wrong", in the interest of
setting the record straight.  The original poster was interested in
how Force 10 stacks up against the competition from a feature and
price prospective.  He deserves some cold science, and I'm trying to
help him out.

To wit, you said F10 is cheaper than a comparable Cisco 6500 (in a
basic gig-e configuration).  I demonstrated that's not the case.  You
responded with ad-hominem attacks, followed by indifference, and
later, claims of emotional distress; still you refuse to provide any
hard numbers, claiming it's "not your job".  Where I come from, people
like that are referred to as sore losers. :)

Drive Slow,
Paul Wall