extreme networks

[oxide54]

Opinions on Extreme ?

 

Anyone used them, have them?

 

Failure rate ? Reliability that sort of thing.

[glennda]

Had a demo unit from them - seemed ok but didn't like the interface much - preferred the HP CLI

[oxide54]

i like the CLI and the features, i just a little concerned when you google the terms extreme networks and reliability or failure rate, all that comes up is 80%+ 63% failure rate.

 

but to be fair to them there are very few results its just the 3 results there is are negative.....

[glennda]

i like the CLI and the features, i just a little concerned when you google the terms extreme networks and reliability or failure rate, all that comes up is 80%+ 63% failure rate.

 

but to be fair to them there are very few results its just the 3 results there is are negative.....

 

Whats the warranty like? Can you afford to keep one spare incase one fails? I know with most of the HP Kit its lifetime warranty'd and cheap enough to keep either a spare gigabit or 10/100 switch.

 

You still stacking switches?

[sidewinder]

It was quite a few years ago now, but bought a core switch from them and over a couple of years I think about 4 or 5 out of 32 fibre ports failed, so wasn't overly impressed.

The fact it was purple and looked cool in the rack is about the best thing I'd say about it, which says a lot.

 

May be a lot different now, but personally I'd stick with a vendor there is a lot more information about such as HP

 

Edit: having said all that, apart from the ports failing it was pretty rock solid, I just didn't like it

Edited July 11, 2012 by sidewinder

[sonofsanta]

Some people mentioned extreme in an older thread of mine so may be worth a glance through that (and a few judicious PMs, perhaps)

[Fazza]

When I worked at a College we had core and edge switches from Extreme across 5 campuses around 2 counties and found them to be very reliable. I guess 1 or 2 switches failed over the 5 year period I was there, a few had corrupted themselves and needed their configs restoring (probably one of the Technicians playing around with them that buggered them up rather than 'corrupting themselves' though).

 

We had a yearly maintenance contract that covered both the maintenance of the kit and the configuration of it as well. We had a choice of either getting an engineer out within 24hrs with a new switch or they could just send us a switch and let us download our config file to it. We chose the latter as we actually had a couple of spare switches in our stock cupboard so that way we could get the failed switch replaced very, very quickly.

 

I believe the college has now gone over to Cisco switches as Cisco switches are more expensive so must be better - not quite sure on the logic there but each to their own!

 

[Wes]

Might be a little late but...... Extreme Networks make some very slick products and are some of the most reliable in terms of up-time not only because the hardware is stable but they also have a modular OS, called XOS which can automatically restart processes without needing to reboot the whole OS. Extreme's main market has always been ISPs and top of rack switching in data centers for this very reason (and the fact they have a switch chassis which has up to 196 40Gbps ports!). Recently they have brought out a range of gigabit PoE and Non PoE switches, which are all under 10" deep (so great for wall cabinets) at a very competitive price. They also offer 10Gbps uplinks and stacking at 40Gbps in these switches(I'm referring to the X440 range of switches). Personally we have had a lot of success with these in secondary schools and colleges because the price is very similar to HP, the hardware comes with a lifetime warranty too but the main draw is the smarts you can get out of XOS (absolutely ALL Extreme switches run the same OS, which is nice and easy compared to HPs plethora of different OS versions of Commware and Provision).

 

XOS features Identity Manager so the switch can directly query AD or any LDAP data base and apply a role to the user at the edge port - basically .1x without the need for complex set up or multiple databases. They run EAPS (which is like a super fast spanning tree, which can re-route traffic in a link fails without losing a ping, and is great for eliminating the chance of network loops created by over enthusiastic cleaners 'tidying' cables by plugging the loose end into another wall socket!). The there's Universal Port, so the switch will run a script depending on what's plugged into the port - you can use this to configure VoIP phones, WAPs, IP cameras etc - anything you can talk to via XML, and put them automatically into the right VLAN, QoS etc with zero config. All of this saves a lot of time and hassle from a management perspective. Best of all this is all included in XOS at no extra charge and the Ridgeline Management software is free for up to 10 nodes (a single node can be a stack of up to 8 switches). All of the switches stack too btw.