Nexus 7010 Competitors – Part 2

**** Please note that these are my own thoughts and observations and should not in any way be taken to be the opinion(s) of my employer. Additionally, this is a rather long post, so please bear with me. I promise not to waste your time by babbling incessantly about non relevant things.

Finally! After many hours spent sifting through vendor websites and reading various documents, I have finished my comparison. If there’s one thing I came away with in this process, it’s that some vendors are better than others at providing specifics regarding their platforms. By far, Juniper was the best at providing in depth documentation on their hardware and software. Although Cisco has a ton of information out there about the Nexus 7000, I found that a lot of it was more on the architecture/design side and less on the actual specifics of the platform itself. Some vendors still hide documentation behind a login that only works with a valid support contract. In my opinion, that’s not a good thing. I think most people research products before they decide to buy, so why hide things that are going to cause roadblocks for people like myself trying to do some initial research? I’ve read MANY brochures, white papers, data sheets, third party “independent” tests(meaning a vendor paid for a canned report that gives a big thumbs up to their product), and other marketing documents in the past couple of weeks. I did not actively seek out conversations with sales people in regards to these products. I did have a couple of conversations around these products and not all the people I talked to were straight sales people. Some were very technical. However, I wanted to go off the things that the websites were advertising. Once the list is narrowed down to 2 or 3 platforms, the REAL work begins with an even deeper dive into the platforms.

I wish I could display the whole thing on this website and have it look pretty. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do that and make it look nice. Remember, I get paid for networking stuff and not my web skills! In consideration of that, I have attached a PDF file of my comparison chart. I have the original in Excel format, but I didn’t upload it. If you want a copy, I can certainly e-mail it to you. You can send me your e-mail address via a direct message on Twitter. I can be found here.

What IS included in the spreadsheet.

I would love to say that I did all of this work for the benefit of my fellow network engineers, but I would be lying if I said that. I built this out of a specific need that my employer has or will have in the coming months/years. Due to that, some of the features that were important to me may not be important to you. If you find yourself wondering why I included it, just chalk it up to it being something that I considered a
requirement. Having said that, it would be selfish not to share this information with you, so take it for what it’s worth.

When it comes to the actual numbers of things like fan trays and power supplies, I tend to build out the chassis to the full amount it will hold. If it can take 8 power supplies, I will probably use 8. Same with fabric
modules. I like to plan with the belief that I will fully populate the chassis at some point, so I want to have enough power, throughput, and cooling on board to handle any new blades. All chassis examined have the
ability to run on less than the maximum number of power supplies.

When it comes to throughput rates, you have to distinguish between full duplex numbers and half duplex numbers. They don’t always specify which is which, so you have to dig through a lot of documentation to figure out what they are really saying. Thankfully marketing people tend to favor the larger numbers so more often than not, the number given is full duplex. In the case of slot bandwidth, I used the half duplex speed. The backplane numbers are all full duplex.

What IS NOT included in the spreadsheet and why.

If I were to include every single thing these switches support, the spreadsheet would be 10 times bigger than it already is. There are quite a few things that I consider to be basic requirements. These basic things
were left out of the sheet to avoid cluttering it up with things you probably already know. For example, does the switch support IPv6? This should be a resounding yes. If it doesn’t, why in the world would I even
consider it? The same can be said with routing protocols. They all should support OSPFv2 and RIPv2 at a minimum. Most, if not all support IS-IS and BGP as well. It is also worth pointing out that I may not even need this switch to run layer 3. I am looking for 10Gig aggregation and am not necessarily concerned about anything other than layer 2. All of these switches also support QoS. Perhaps they do things a little differently
between each switch, but the basics are still the basics and I don’t really need a billion different options when it comes to QoS. That may change in a few years, but for now, I am not looking at running anything
other than non-storage traffic over these switches.

I think you see my point by now. I could go on and on about what isn’t included. If it is something well known like SSH for management purposes, I don’t need to include it in the list. It’s a given.

Special note on the TOR(Top of Rack) fabric extension.

While I primarily need 10Gig aggregation, another bonus is the ability to have 1Gig copper aggregation as well. However, I don’t want it all coming back to the chassis itself. The Nexus 7010 has the ability through the Nexus 5000’s(of which I already own several) to attach Nexus 2000 series fabric extenders that function as top of rack switches(although it’s not REALLY a switch). This is a nice bonus feature as I can aggregate a lot of copper connections back to 1 chassis without all the spaghetti wiring that is commonly seen in 6500’s and 4500’s. In the case of Brocade and Force10, they actually have the TOR extensions as nothing more than MRJ-21 patch panels. With 1 cable(which is the width of a pencil) per 6 copper ports, the amount of wiring coming back to the chassis is reduced tremendously.

Additionally, there is no power consumption at the top of the rack like there is with the Nexus 2000’s and it is a direct link to the top of rack connections unlike the Nexus model where I have an intermediate 5000 series switch in between.

One final note. The HP/H3C A12508 is listed on the HP site as the A12508, but when you click into the actual product page, it is listed as the S12508. These terms can be mixed and matched and mean the same chassis. I have chosen to use A12508 as the model number as much as possible in this post, but my previous post that mentioned the various switches used the letter “S” instead of “A”.

I plan on posting a few more thoughts on this process as it pertains to specific platforms. I was awed by several of the platforms, not just by the hardware itself, but by the approach the company is taking to the data center in general. Any of these platforms will do the job I need them to do. Some will do that job a lot better than others. As for cost, I have only seen numbers on a few of the platforms. That’s something that is important, but not the most important. You can read my previous post on this for more clarification on what my thought process is.

Remember that I am not claiming to be an expert in regards to any of these platforms. I have done many hours of research on them, but there is a chance that some information in this PDF file will be wrong. If you see any glaring errors, please let me know. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings. If anything is marked “Unknown”, rest assured that I looked at every possible piece of literature on the website that I could reasonably find. If you managed to read this far in the post, the file is below. Enjoy!

Nexus 7010 Comparison – PDF File

*****Update – The Juniper 8200 series does support multi-chassis link aggregation. It just requires another piece to make it work. The XRE200 External Routing Engine gives the 8200 this capability. Thanks to Abner Germanow from Juniper for clarifying that!