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F E A T U R E

Premium Network, Four Ways

March 21, 2003
By Peter Morrissey

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Enterasys Networks

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Uptime All the Time
	Foundry Networks
	Enterasys Networks
	Extreme Networks
	Alcatel
	CradletoGrave Looks to Grow
	Web Links
	Complete Responses to RFI

Enterasys was the only vendor besides Foundry to propose solid, standards-based solutions for all four of our scenarios. It was edged out by Foundry because some of Enterasys' proposed products were not planned for release until April 2. Also, its 10 Gigabit card has not shipped yet, though it's scheduled to hit the streets by the time this goes to print. You could argue that this will become less of an issue over time, but you could also argue that such delays are indicative of a vendor's track record for adopting new technology. The 10 Gigabit standard was approved last June, and it was solid enough to develop standards-based products even before then.

Overall, however, Enterasys appeared ready to meet all our needs while adhering to standards, a major factor. The quality of its response set a high bar for the other vendors--the company provided thorough answers for all our questions, and its proposal showed a level of clarity and detail that far surpassed the competition.

We were also impressed by the details Enterasys revealed about its internal tech support. It was clear to us that, at least on paper, the tech support processes are efficient and well-thought-out. Of course, that doesn't guarantee they work, but it would certainly give us some good questions for the other vendors were we to investigate tech support further. We would also, of course, talk to customers of all the candidates about the effectiveness of their tech support.

Pricing for Enterasys' 100-Mbps scenario was the second lowest of all the vendors, at $373,034. Its gigabit solution, however, was priced the second highest, at $1,043,796, just below Foundry's $1,194,265. The Enterasys gigabit-desktop setup required four models of chassis and stackables because the stackables alone do not have enough port density to support gigabit in the closet. And, though it's price was less than that of Foundry's chassis solution, unlike Foundry, Enterasys didn't have a less expensive alternative, and it used four different platforms to pull this off.

One feature of the Enterasys platform that was technically superior to Foundry's was the ability to do NAT in ASICs on the Expedition platform that is used at the core, and to aggregate wiring closets. Normally, this is done between a internal network and its Internet connection, where the speeds tend to be slower, making performance less of an issue. But if you are doing NAT on a high-speed Internet link, or for some reason are doing translations inside your network, you could probably expect better performance from the Enterasys solution. Like Foundry, Enterasys partnered with a midspan vendor to offer PoE, using Red Hawk 8000 products for this purpose.

Enterasys uses its NetSight Atlas management platform for centralized management. We were a little disappointed that it didn't support a SQL database. Pulling out management statistics and loading them into a report is much easier with a standard database. Sharing the ton of info that the management platform collects can be handy, and proprietary stores limit flexibility.

Like the other vendors, Enterasys claimed that its management would ease the configuration of things like QoS. In fact, on two of the platforms, the Matrix E7 and the Matrix N3, Enterasys also claimed to have 16 queues per port available for QoS, twice those of the other vendors. It's hard to imagine needing that many queues, but if you do, that's something to investigate.