My experiences with Extreme equipment at both L2 and L3 has been extremely pleasing. We done Black Diamonds talking BGP to Junipers and found no problems save for lack of ATM legacy support on the Extreme gear (I'd love to cleanly map PVCs into an 802.1q VLAN). We've not done BGP from the Alpines, as we use them primarily for 10/100 to Gig aggregation to BDs at the core, but its the same software on both platforms so I don't imagine any problems would crop up specific to the Alpines. As for the load balancing aspect, we've been less giddy. It's functional, especially if you are balancing basic HTML/SSL type traffic, but tends to break down when you try to get more creative (such as DNS caching servers, for example). If your client needs basic TCP load balancing for http, smtp, etc (which will suffice for many people), you should still get excellent results from the 380x line. On Thu, 31 May 2001, Arnold Nipper wrote:
I know ExtremeNetwork's high position in L2, but don't have any idea how they perform on L3. Now an Alpine3804 might the right solution for a customer as he needs a loadbalancer, switch and router which also should do BGP.
Any experience and hints welcome!
Arnold