On Jan 12, 2015, at 10:34 AM, Justin Wilson - MTIN <lists@mtin.net> wrote: Cost per port is what we always look at. If we are going into a market where there won’t be much growth we look at Cisco and Force 10. Their cost per port is usually cheaper for smaller 10 Gig switches. You need something that is fairly robust.
We see a lot of IXPs being formed or upgrading with Cisco Nexus 3524 switches, which have 48 1G-10G SFP/SFP+ physical ports, license-limited to 24 active, upgradeable to 48 active. FWIW, 83% of IXPs have 48 or fewer participants, and 70% of IXPs have 24 or fewer participants. And the failure rate of chassis-based switches is _way_ higher than that of stand-alone switches. So we never recommend that an IXP buy a switch larger than necessary to accommodate 18 months reasonably-projectable growth. -Bill