So. CISCO, their licensing, sales, software bugs, and support are giving me the shits.
I’m looking for 2x (for now, to start) 48x10GbE (SFP+) + 40 GbE uplinks as a “host to SAN” option for iSCSI and NFS short term until we need faster.
Considering DELL S4048-ON as they look to give about the ports I need and do layer 3 stuff which is nice and are quite cheap. Aware they’re going end of sale, but these are likely to be short-ish term before being repurposed elsewhere.
Comments? Anyone dealt with either DELL or Aruba (HPE) from a switching perspective?
Any suggestions for vendor who has decent firmware and after sales support? Any specific complaints with Aruba or DELL? I’ve had zero issues with DELL from a server support perspective, similar with switch gear?
Cisco vendor keeps trying to sell me Nexus 9300/9400, and I just don’t want to spend 50k on switches when I’m sure that until we upgrade our sans, 10GbE will be plenty to get us out of the woods for now.
I use HPE Aruba exclusively at my shop, and haven’t had any complaints over features or support. HPE was heavily discounting their newest CX line of switches, I think that promo is over or will be soon (like 60-70% discount.}
Just picked up two CX 6405 switches for less than msrp on one of them. Still expensive, and maybe overkill for your situation…
Does Mikrotik offer support packages? I thought they were like Ubiquiti in that they’re functioning more like an OEM and it’s up to the buyer or 3rd party to support.
Check out the CX6300M model JL658A switch… It has 24x SFP+ / 4x SFP56 ports, so you could stack two of them for your 48 port density. That’s 24x 10gig ports and 4x 50gig ports (not sure if they do 40gig which is really 4x 10gig combined.)
Lifetime advanced replacement warranty (I have had HPE replace ten year old switches before.)
You get one year of tech support included, and the extensions aren’t too expensive.
Yeah, Microtik are so far off my radar they’re in space.
There’s no local vendor for them, no local support (and by support I mean “this power supply just died, I need one tomorrow”, etc.), most vendors here have probably never even heard of them. They may have great hardware or whatever, but…
I think we’re going to settle on DELL. Our 6 new EPYCs just arrived from DELL, have never had any issues with enterprise support from them, etc.
Most MikroTik gear can be powered of PoE, so you could have the wall adapter and PoE as redundancy.
And as they take 10 to 30V (yes, that range), in a pinch your car battery would work.
The PSU was merely an example as one component that may fail - not the only case
Think backplane, module, whatever. I need to be able to get a box replaced pronto - not waiting for 6 weeks for Microtik to ship from international to Australia
Keeping your own spares, or dual homing machines was basically what I was going to suggest, but mikrotik doesn’t sell 48port sfp+ and it’s kind of meh in various ways.
They have CRS326-24S+2Q+RM … 24x 10Gig + 2x 40gig … for about 500 bucks a piece ($750 AUD at duxtel - you can find resellers/distributors on mikrotik website), not exactly the same thing since you’d be pushing any cross rack traffic all the way up to spine…
Also, the feature set is very low end and management is quirky, think of a dumb L2 switch you can ssh into our get some metrics from SNMP. Forget about L3 switching/routing at interface speeds, the silicon is capable but they don’t have the software for it unless you use Router OS 7 beta and your topology happens to be be a perfect fit to be supported.
