10GbE Switches Gnodal vs IBM

[PithyChats]

I am looking at a couple of 10GbE Switches.

The two I am considering are the Gnodal GS4008 and the IBM G8124. Does any one have experience with both?

Pros for the Gondal - 40GbE ports.
Known working with cheap lamps - Finisar FTLX8571D3BCL
I can get it slightly cheaper.

Pros for the IBM - Layer 3 Support.

 

[Scott Laird]

Downside for the Gnodal is that it's *really* not documented well. Or, rather, at all anymore. Fortunately, there are a ton of switches on the market that all licensed the same firmware from the same developer, and you can *mostly* get by with their docs. Mostly.

I have the GS0018, and I'm pretty happy with it now. Getting it configured was a pain, and it was crashing and rebooting every couple days for a while, but that seems to have stopped. I'm pretty sure it was either a bad cable (had a couple of those) or a bad driver for one NIC that was OOMing the switch somehow. It wasn't the only weird thing that stopped when I replaced the NIC.

It's been up 44 days now, since the last power work.

Ignoring the L3 side of things, the Gnodal is almost certainly a better hardware. If nothing else, it has 40 GbE ports, better latency, and more 10 GbE ports.

 

[PithyChats]

Downside for the Gnodal is that it's *really* not documented well. Or, rather, at all anymore. Fortunately, there are a ton of switches on the market that all licensed the same firmware from the same developer, and you can *mostly* get by with their docs. Mostly.

I have the GS0018, and I'm pretty happy with it now. Getting it configured was a pain, and it was crashing and rebooting every couple days for a while, but that seems to have stopped. I'm pretty sure it was either a bad cable (had a couple of those) or a bad driver for one NIC that was OOMing the switch somehow. It wasn't the only weird thing that stopped when I replaced the NIC.

It's been up 44 days now, since the last power work.

Ignoring the L3 side of things, the Gnodal is almost certainly a better hardware. If nothing else, it has 40 GbE ports, better latency, and more 10 GbE ports.

Thanks. Is the CLI comprehensive? Are there any seemingly critical missing features?

 

[Scott Laird]

It's a Cisco clone. They're all mostly similar. Gnodal has a couple weird issues with Emacs editing keys, but nothing major.

One thing to watch is that you *can't* do in-band management on Gnodals. You have to connect the management port to a different switch in order to manage it, and I had to put it on a different VLAN or weird MAC table issues popped up. Odds are that was a bug in my LB4M, though, and I haven't tried to reproduce it in months.

Also, the serial console connector is a 3.5mm audio jack. Which is weird.

I bought a LB4M and a Gnodal at the same time, and by and large the Gnodal felt more polished. If I'd had better docs then it would have been nearly perfect.

Given the choice, I'd much rather have something from Juniper with full L3 support, but the QFX5100-24Q is kinda out of my price range. I strongly prefer Juniper's UI to Cisco's (much less Cisco clones), but they don't have any cheap switches with more than a couple 10G ports at the moment.

If you wait long enough, you *might* be able to get an EX4500 for under $3k, but that's still quite a bit pricier than either switch you're looking at. They seem to be holding at $5k or so on eBay, but none of the $5k switches are actually selling.

 

[Gene_Z]

Hi Anyone attempted to get port mirroring (monitor) to work ?

i tried
GNOS(config)# monitor session 1 source interface Ethernet 0/53
GNOS(config)# monitor session 1 destination interface Ethernet 0/72

result is
GNOS# sh monitor all
Session : 1
-------
Source Ports
Rx : Eth0/53
Destination Ports : Eth0/72
Unfortunately i don't see mirrored traffic on 0/72 interface.


Surprisingly when i reload the switch i see about 5 packets coming through, which lends me to believe there is some sort of feature i need to shut off in order for mirroring to work.

Please Help,
Thanks in advance
Sorry for posting in 2 threads ....