Cisco FabricPath Competitors and Alternatives

What is our primary use case?

I have been a network engineer since the mid-nineties. The company I am in now has19 buildings and 50 plus switches, all Extreme. We use lots of gen one and gen twos — either the X460s or X690s — using the SummitStack. That is our standard variant of the Extreme Networks. We do have a couple of old 460s and a couple of old 480s, but we use the SummitStack for those versions instead of the Black Diamond.

What other advice do I have?

Advice that I would give to people considering switches is that I think Extreme products are pretty feature-rich and they are definitely worth considering alongside the competition. They just have to be aware they are not going to be working like they would with Cisco, which means fewer resources and potentially fewer candidates to work with the solution as engineers. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate ExtremeSwitching as an eight-out-of-ten.

What is our primary use case?

Dell PowerConnect Switches make up part of our network and they are connected to our Dell servers.

What other advice do I have?

We have decreased our use of Dell PowerConnect Switches in the past year because we are moving to virtualization and using SDN switches. The problem comes about because it is difficult to see the server end-point directly on the SDN. For our Dell servers, we are replacing the switches with pass-through modules because the spanning tree loops are the same. My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to consider issues that might occur when using devices from multiple vendors. We found this difficult because of the integration. We like Dell because it is easy to use and it…

What is our primary use case?

We are in the healthcare industry. Most of our switches are modular because we need a lot of ports in one location.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to plan well. Most of the reason for error is poor planning. Be sure to ask your vendor questions because there are no dumb questions. Rather, silly mistakes happen when people implement without a full understanding. This is a good product but there is always room for improvement in these kinds of devices. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.