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Would you also encourage such a network be built with diversity of parts suppliers? I ask because it seems like you'd want to be able to also resist attackers

by mjevans 10y ago

Would you also encourage such a network be built with diversity of parts suppliers? I ask because it seems like you'd want to be able to also resist attackers exploiting a bug in a single vendor solution.

itchyouch 10y ago
Depends on the features that are needed. Cisco seems to have a quite a bit of cisco-only protocols that require Cisco gear. And for our particular use-cases, we seem to need those features. Then again, I'm at a ultra low latency shop that requires port-to-port switching at sub 300 nanos and faster. If one is using standard protocols (bgp, ospf, etc) then mixing and matching doesn't really seem to be a problem.
- packetized 10y ago
  Even OSPF/IS-IS interop is sketchy at best with some vendors, these days. Ah well.
walrus01 10y ago
There are a great many ISPs successfully using a mix of juniper, Cisco, arista and other stuff. You will find extreme and foundry 1000baseT switches all over the place still. I would never encourage a monoculture of one model nexus 3000 or anything similar to that.
- pinewurst 10y ago
  There's a lot of CCIE types out there who feel they have to maintain a totally Cisco shop regardless of equipment or diversity merits. This is finally beginning to fade, but I've seen it more than a few times.
vidarh 10y ago
Personally I'd never deploy a single model at the very least, when I am given the budgets for full redundancy, but ideally I'd prefer different suppliers too. I've lost too much sleep fixing problems where someone stupidly thought it was "simpler" to deal with the same everywhere. Until the same problem took down every router at once, or the same manufacturing defect caused their drives to start failing at a high rate at nearly the same time... So it's not just attackers, but being susceptible to the same thing triggering the same bug by accident at the same time, or manufacturing defects across a whole batch or model, or affecting a part that's used all over the place.

by mjevans 10y ago

itchyouch 10y ago

Depends on the features that are needed. Cisco seems to have a quite a bit of cisco-only protocols that require Cisco gear. And for our particular use-cases, we seem to need those features. Then again, I'm at a ultra low latency shop that requires port-to-port switching at sub 300 nanos and faster. If one is using standard protocols (bgp, ospf, etc) then mixing and matching doesn't really seem to be a problem.

packetized 10y ago
Even OSPF/IS-IS interop is sketchy at best with some vendors, these days. Ah well.

walrus01 10y ago

There are a great many ISPs successfully using a mix of juniper, Cisco, arista and other stuff. You will find extreme and foundry 1000baseT switches all over the place still. I would never encourage a monoculture of one model nexus 3000 or anything similar to that.

pinewurst 10y ago
There's a lot of CCIE types out there who feel they have to maintain a totally Cisco shop regardless of equipment or diversity merits. This is finally beginning to fade, but I've seen it more than a few times.

vidarh 10y ago

Personally I'd never deploy a single model at the very least, when I am given the budgets for full redundancy, but ideally I'd prefer different suppliers too. I've lost too much sleep fixing problems where someone stupidly thought it was "simpler" to deal with the same everywhere. Until the same problem took down every router at once, or the same manufacturing defect caused their drives to start failing at a high rate at nearly the same time... So it's not just attackers, but being susceptible to the same thing triggering the same bug by accident at the same time, or manufacturing defects across a whole batch or model, or affecting a part that's used all over the place.