On Dec 28, 2016, at 5:34 PM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
An alternative multi-vendor approach is to use 1 vendor per stack layer, but alternate layer to layer. That is; Vendor A edge router, Vendor B firewall, Vendor A/C switches, Vendor D anti-SPAM software, etc. This doesn't address the bug impact issue as well as it alleviates the vendor "ownership" issue though...
i think this is where i say that i hope my competitors do this. it is a recipe for a complex set of delicate dependencies and great fun debugging.
One of the more spectacular failures I've seen was a bug in a network core router that caused bad into to be carried by all of that same vendor's routers across the core to the edges (made by a different vendor) which promptly barfed and locked up. So I'd be cautious about saying "vendor X for one layer, vendor Y for adjacent layer" as a multi-vendor strategy. David Barak Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts