Brocade ICX Series (cheap & powerful 10gbE/40gbE switching)

[sic0048]

New member here. Just purchased the ICX 7250-24P from the Bay. I'm fed up with my Aruba 2500.

Just curious what is wrong with the Aruba 2500? I have bought several Brocade switches and have been playing with them in a "lab setting". Truth be told, I am trying to completely redo my home network (new firewall, new switches, new wireless AP, etc, etc, etc) and have been slowly building it up and testing in the "lab". That being said, I am still running an Aruba 2500 currently on the "old" network currently.

Comparatively, I think the Brocade switches (7250s) are louder and use more energy than the Aruba. I still plan on replacing the Aruba switch with them, but was just curious what is annoying you about the Aruba.

 

[iiq_87cjs]

Just curious what is wrong with the Aruba 2500? I have bought several Brocade switches and have been playing with them in a "lab setting". Truth be told, I am trying to completely redo my home network (new firewall, new switches, new wireless AP, etc, etc, etc) and have been slowly building it up and testing in the "lab". That being said, I am still running an Aruba 2500 currently on the "old" network currently.

Comparatively, I think the Brocade switches (7250s) are louder and use more energy than the Aruba. I still plan on replacing the Aruba switch with them, but was just curious what is annoying you about the Aruba.

I suspect a hardware issue triggered by a power surge a few weeks ago. Since then, the switch has exhibited erratic fan behavior—spinning up randomly despite no changes in network load.
Admin mode remains inaccessible despite multiple attempts, including updating to the latest firmware and performing a factory reset. Any configuration changes made through the GUI cause the switch to freeze. The same happens when attempting to log in as enable (EN) via SSH.
The unit had been running flawlessly for nearly three years before this incident

Disclaimer: I'm not a pro.

 

[Sprint8]

I had an Aruba 3500 POE for a year i spent too much money trying to get working SFP+ transceivers with no luck

 

[papkee]

Worth checking if some of the other ports still work for PoE. Can't recall on the 6450 but on the 7250 each PoE controller chip powers a group of 8? ports. I had a power surge on a port that took out it's group of 8 but the other groups still worked fine.

Good call! Switched over to the next bank of ports and it does appear to be working again. Kind of annoying, but some PoE is better than no PoE I guess

 

[hmw]

C9300-48UXM, C9300-24UX (or older c3850) are the ones I landed on. They are 10 dba quieter but use more power

Have been looking through eBay for these Cisco models - can you talk a little bit about the licensing situation with Cisco? Are licenses for the C9300-48UXM easily available without paywalls/fees etc? The big draw for the Ruckus switches was the honor based licensing (and of course @fohdeesha's public PhD thesis on these switches)

 

[BoGs]

I do not use the extended features mostly use them as L2 switches, so not able to talk about those but I have an -A model so I have not stopped from doing what I want

 

[viperk1]

how have people mounted the fan to asic heatsink? I have the replacement fans but ill need to get screws or some other way to mount

I just twistied the fan in two places - the poe board power cable and a poe board mounting screw.

Happy to report that with my switch (ICX7250-48P) in operation the temperature has stabilized at 69C mgmt, 33.5C air outlet.

I'm using 4x 10G nics, 20x 1G nics, of which 5 are using poe totalling 17W

 

[viperk1]

Just curious what is wrong with the Aruba 2500? I have bought several Brocade switches and have been playing with them in a "lab setting". Truth be told, I am trying to completely redo my home network (new firewall, new switches, new wireless AP, etc, etc, etc) and have been slowly building it up and testing in the "lab". That being said, I am still running an Aruba 2500 currently on the "old" network currently.

Comparatively, I think the Brocade switches (7250s) are louder and use more energy than the Aruba. I still plan on replacing the Aruba switch with them, but was just curious what is annoying you about the Aruba.

Different reasons but I also moved from Aruba S2500 to ICX7250 just last night. After the fan mod, it's the same noise level (subjectively the brocade might be quieter in steady state, and objectively it is quieter at bootup). Mine was basically because my port needs grew more than a single 24P Aruba so I had to put my backup Aruba into production. I found these for $25 each on sale on ebay so I thought I'd just try it out. One 48P brocade used less power than 2 24P Arubas. I went from 174W to 107W (this is all my networking equipment, not just the brocade).

 

[Fallen Kell]

Very nice find and snag for those ICX7250 at $25... That really is a steal. Easily worth 4x that amount.

 

[NNate]

I think I may have fried the POE on my ICX6450-24p tonight. I wanted to re-terminate one of the ends of cables going to my POE AP. I was dumb and didn't unplug the cable from my switch and I think I shorted things out while cutting the ethernet - causing the switch to power off.

When I unplugged and then plugged in back in, I no longer have POE on over half of my ports.

show inline power:

Power Capacity:        Total is 370000 mWatts. Current Free is 370000 mWatts.

Power Allocations:     Requests Honored 0 times


Port    Admin     Oper    ---Power(mWatts)---  PD Type  PD Class  Pri  Fault/
         State     State   Consumed  Allocated                          Error
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1/1/1    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/2    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/3    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/4    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/5    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/6    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/7    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/8    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
  1/1/9    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/10    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/11    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/12    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/13    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/14    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/15 Off     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/16    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/17    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/18    Off    Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/19    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/20    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/21    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/22    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/23    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
1/1/24    On     Off            0          0  n/a      n/a         3  n/a
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                             0          0

show inline power detail:

Power Supply Data On stack 1:
++++++++++++++++++



Power Supply Data:
++++++++++++++++++

Power Supply #1:
    Max Curr:      6.8 Amps
    Voltage:       54.0 Volts
    Capacity:      370 Watts
power supply 2 is not present


POE Details Info. On Stack 1 :


General PoE Data:
+++++++++++++++++

Firmware
Version
----------------
02.1.0 Build 004



Cumulative Port State Data:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

#Ports    #Ports     #Ports   #Ports    #Ports       #Ports     #Ports
Admin-On  Admin-Off  Oper-On  Oper-Off  Off-Denied   Off-No-PD  Off-Fault
-------------------------------------------------------------------------



Cumulative Port Power Data:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

#Ports  #Ports  #Ports        Power       Power
Pri: 1  Pri: 2  Pri: 3  Consumption  Allocation
-----------------------------------------------

Thankfully my Wifi APs are setup on ports 1/1/2-1/1/5 and those are working fine, but nothing else is.

I upgraded the firmware and the POE firmware to the latest to see if that helps things, but no luck.

Any idea what I can do to bring things back alive? It's interesting that anything is working given the above output...

 

[kotanu]

Anyone have experience fan-modding a ICX-7150-48ZP? I searched this thread for some related terms but didn't find anything that seemed to apply to this switch.

I picked up one of these from eBay hoping to get multigig and 802.3bt for a couple of access points that are currently on injectors, plus a new network camera. Unfortunately, the switch is definitely too loud for the closet where all my network gear is. It was meant to replace a Cisco 2960X-48FPS, which is currently powering about 40W of actual PoE consumption, and I'd expect this to stay below 150W after adding the new devices. I plan to use this only as a L2 switch, with a limited number of 10gig ports in use.

The main issue for noise is the power supply fan. It's a 38x38x28 fan (Sunon PF38281BX-Q160-S99). I cracked the PSU open, and that fan perfectly fits the space available. I'm wondering if I could potentially get away with mounting a 40mm Noctua to the outside of the PSU case (ie, protruding from the back of the switch). The PSU section of this switch is separately ducted, and replacing the "main" fan looks simple enough.

Thoughts? I know there's a chassis temperature sensor, but can I monitor temperature data from the PSU as well?