Force10 Gear - Opinions

[Joel.Snyder at Opus1.COM (Joel Snyder)]

> Subject: Force10 Gear - Opinions
>
> Does anyone here have real-world experience with Force 10 gear
> (Specifically their E-Series and C-Series)? They came and did their
> whole dog and pony show today, but I wanted to get real-world feedback
> on their gear.

I was at a customer site doing a NAC deployment study recently ( <6 
months ago) and there was some Force10 edge gear in place.  We had to 
drop the Force10 gear out of the picture because it didn't support any 
of the rich features that we needed to get NAC up and running.

The customer was perfectly happy with the ability of the stuff to pass 
packets and act as a not-very-smart edge switch, and hadn't evaluated 
the feature set for anything beyond that.

My conclusion was that if you want to use it at the edge to pass a lot 
of packets at 'enterprise' line rates and don't care about anything else 
(we were looking at good 802.1X support with ACLs and all of the other 
miscellaneous bits that make NAC work, YMMV) then it seems to be fine 
per this customer's experience.  If you want something with a stronger 
feature set for future expansion, there seem to be other companies that 
have more experience.

In David Newman's test of 10G edge switches
(http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2008/032408-switch-test.html)
Force10 elected not to participate, which is often telling.

jms

Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Senior Partner, Opus One       Phone: +1 520 324 0494
jms at Opus1.COM                http://www.opus1.com/jms