FS N8560-32C 32x 100GbE Switch Review

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RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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I don't really see why you would chose to buy something like this...

I am sure the specs look great but software wise what can you actually expect from them? For me, it seems unwise to buy into a device that is supported about as well as a standard TP-link home router for an enterprise environment. Of course hopefully they are not that bad (presumably their software is (or is based on) Broadcom ICOS, which should help, but they do need to keep up with updates).

Of course I haven't bothered with looking into the finer details of their support setup, but I figure they would probably benefit from acting a bit like Cisco/Juniper/etc., such as by providing guarantees for how they will update the devices in the future. A device like this is not a small investment, so it is not unreasonable to expect to get issues fixed.

Having Sonic support would likely also be beneficial, it could (at least theoretically) provide a platform that is mostly updated by upstream, then FS engineers could focus on enabling support for the devices.

There's always going to be the anti-Huawei/ZTE/China argument which can impact FS too (clearly not everyone should just buy whatever is the cheapest), but I believe if they want to establish themselves on the market and sell to Western countries (probably domestic ones too) they can't treat selling Enterprise level gear as if they were TP-link home devices.
 

Terry Kennedy

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Jun 25, 2015
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www.glaver.org
I am sure the specs look great but software wise what can you actually expect from them? For me, it seems unwise to buy into a device that is supported about as well as a standard TP-link home router for an enterprise environment. Of course hopefully they are not that bad (presumably their software is (or is based on) Broadcom ICOS, which should help, but they do need to keep up with updates).
This is an excellent point which is quite important to my company.

I have some older FS products where we received very different versions of firmware over a period of several months. When I asked about updating them all to the same version, I was eventually able to get the firmware files (yes, multiple files for different parts of the product) and update utilities (in Chinese only) but with a warning that I do the updates at my own risk and they would not accept any warranty claims for bricked devices. I ended up writing my own management and monitoring utility for the products.

It seems like they have a much better update method in place for current products - if I select "Resources / Technical Documents / Software / Software" I get 260 hits and from looking at the first 6 pages of results, the file dates are all recent.

But I would really want to see how quickly updates are released when a severe vulnerability (like the industry-wide OpenSSL ones) newly pops up.
 
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