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.
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.
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