I look forward to this thread. I think one important thing is who is your addressable market size? I'm working with a startup IXP and there's only 20 carriers in the building. A chassis based switch would be silly as there would never be that many people present. 2x 1U switches would be more than plenty in their environment. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Manuel Marín" <mmg@transtelco.net> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Monday, January 12, 2015 12:35:15 AM Subject: Recommended L2 switches for a new IXP Dear Nanog community We are trying to build a new IXP in some US Metro areas where we have multiple POPs and I was wondering what do you recommend for L2 switches. I know that some IXPs use Nexus, Brocade, Force10 but I don't personally have experience with these switches. It would be great if you can share your experience and recommendations. There are so many options that I don't know if it makes sense to start with a modular switch (usually expensive because the backplane, dual dc, dual CPU, etc) or start with a 1RU high density switch that support new protocols like Trill and that supposedly allow you to create Ethernet Fabric/Clusters. The requirements are simple, 1G/10G ports for exchange participants, 40G/100G for uplinks between switches and flow support for statistics and traffic analysis. Thank you and have a great day. Regards