Let me be fair by saying I work on designs on a regular basis that are 99% Cisco.  Of course, there are integrations with other equipment for every technology, but from an R/S standpoint, it’s mainly Cisco.  Occasionally, I’ll come across competitive (to CSCO) information, but that’s about it.  For this post, I wanted to make it a point to see what was out there in the new 40 GbE LAN switching market.  It’s a topic that is becoming more popular (for various trends in the Data Center) and I’m really quite surprised about it all, so I figured let’s dive in and see who’s got what. 

And this was a shallow dive.  The goal was not to spend countless hours on each solution; I simply wanted to get a high level overview.  The focus was just to try and get the following questions answered.

Who has fixed configuration switches with 40GbE interfaces?  Do they support “standard” L2/L3 protocols?  Do they support some type of Layer 2 multipathing?  Is there support for a type of MLAG?  What is the port to port latency?  What is the power consumption?  Is there anything “special” about the switch, or is it unique in anyway?

After a few seconds of thinking about it, I decided to focus on Arista, Dell Force10, Extreme, IBM, Juniper, Brocade, HP, and of course, Cisco.

There are a few different warranty programs available from Cisco that are not widely advertised and discussed.  However, given that every customer has different technical and business requirements, it is also true that each customer has different SLAs that have to be met internal to their organization.  So let’s examine some of the options available.

There are standard SMARTnet (SNT) offerings from Cisco that are the norm including 24x7x4 and 8x5xNBD support offerings.  These are probably two of the most popular offerings, but there are many others out there as well.

It is important to note that each of the SMARTnet offerings from Cisco include 24x7x365 access to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC).  I am not here to promote TAC by any means even though it is a world class organization, but this is questioned by the “8”x”5”xNBD usually found in the description of the SNT SKU being sold.  The 24x7x4 and 8x5xNBD most importantly are referring to the turnaround time to get hardware replacements.  So what if you’re an organization that has 200 user access layer switches, and you already spare a bunch of additional switches?  Good question, and for me personally, I would first move away from 24x7x4 SNT if that was the case.  Since the concern is no longer hardware replacement, the most important piece to the DAY 2 support puzzle becomes having a number to call in the case of a problem.  Again, this is a where TAC comes in and you can leverage 8x5xNBD on the switches.  It would be ideal to do a ROI of sparing vs. different levels of SNT being chosen to see which makes the best financial sense for the organization.  Cisco or your local partner can help you with this.