Well, thanks to all who replied. I've attached annotated replies at the bottom of this message. On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Andy Grosser wrote:

This request is largely for anecdotal/historical purposes. The recent Foundry/Riverstone posts reminded me of a topic I'd kept meaning to broach.

My organization will probably be replacing all of our L2/L3 Lucent/Avaya Cajun switches in the next few months with Catalyst 65XX series boxes. Our experience has largely been disastrous - 3 operational years have been filled with _constant_ HW and SW failures, buggy code (i.e. backplane suddenly stops all traffic forwarding), horrible tech support, lousy online resources (a la SW releases). Their M770 ATM gear hasn't been much better, and their PacketStar media gateways are still, surprisingly, limping along.

Anyone care to share their own Lucent/Avaya experiences?

--- We have 1000 ports of Cajun 550 with redundant management- never had a problem with anything in 2 years. --- friend's experience mirrors yours... --- Actually tying back into the previous conversation, I have first hand knowledge that DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), which is essentially the telco for all of the military is swapping out all of their Cajuns and Lucent AP1000s with Riverstone RS 8000s. Both Cisco and Juniper couldn't meet the requirements during the bakeoff. --- After the extreme 48 port switch I have at home died, I bought a 24 port cajun as my home network. So far, the interface sucks. While it works fine for what I need (a few vlans is most of what I need). Here's the list of my qualms: 1) Every time I reboot my switch seems to believe that its 1970. I've got an ntp server for it to sync to, but it won't. There doesn't seem to be a cli option to set the time, either. 2) show port doesn't give any per-interface stats. That's hidden away in "show rmon statistics" and once there I have to subtract 1024 to figure out which interface I'm looking at. Its not too helpful when I'm trying to figure out what ended being a cable problem. Besides that, its a nice home switch. Well, I guess its a home switch for someone who cares about the news on nanog. I wish my extreme was still working, though. --- Bought a P333 off of eBay. Two days later, the management card quit talking to the switch backplane. Got a 133, it's been flawless ever since but is on a protected network. Marconi/FORE has also rebranded the P333 has a ESX-1800. --- We had a P550 that turned up in our department that was the worst piece of networking equipment we had on our network (before we upgraded to all alcatel omniswitch and omnicore gear had cabletron 10bt hubs). Had problems with vlan bleeding on it, seemed to require constant reboots, it would just randomly stop working correctly. One cool thing it could do is auto learn vlans for the gig ports, however that was about the only cool thing. --- We have 5 Lucent PM4 boxes. They were $250-300k when they came out. Within 60 days of the Lucent/Ascend merger, the product was dead. All development stopped and many stupid bugs which would have been easy to fix were never resolved. Promised developments never came. Free upgrades for life ended. The product never evolved from the expensive boat anchor it was when we first bought it. The PM4s work reasonably well for old v.90 RAS boxes, but they never became the VoIP, v.92, super stable boxes they were touted to be when they were introduced. In the middle of all this, my Lucent sales rep called to see if we wanted to buy Cajun switches to replace our Catalysts. I said, "I don't think I'd take them if you gave them to me." She replied by saying she didn't blame me and "they weren't that good anyway." Can you believe it?!?! I saw a tractor trailer load of them for sale (literally) a few years ago for about $2500. It was a list of hundreds of boards and chassis all brand new. I spoke to a friend who still worked at Lucent and he told me they stopped using them in the lab and bought a number of Cisco Catalysts because they had too many problems with them. :) We haven't bought a Lucent product since and I never will again. --- [end of responses] --- Andy Grosser, CCNP andy@meniscus.org "After all, if a bumbling Zen-like talking penguin with a thing for canned herring and pinwheel hats and sly meditations on the state of the galaxy can't save the damn nation, well, who can?" - Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle ---