Extreme won our 10 Gigabit switch review, so we were anxious to see what it had to offer. Neither Alcatel nor Enterasys participated in that test, so it was clear to us that Extreme had a big advantage in its ability to deliver standards-based 10 Gigabit. While it did indeed meet just about all our other technical requirements, we were a little disappointed with Extreme's approach to PoE. Its solution was to recommend a vendor, Mitel Networks, with whom it had done interoperability testing. In fairness, this can be attributed to the immaturity of the standard, but that didn't stop Foundry and Enterasys from coming up with comprehensive solutions and including them in their designs and price.
One unique aspect of Extreme's solution was its building-to-backbone connectivity. It proposed its EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) technology, which sets up something similar to a Sonet ring running over Ethernet, linking all the buildings to the main data center. The purpose of this architecture is to ensure, according to the company, "Sonet-speed, ring-based failover." While there may be advantages to this type of architecture, we had mixed feelings. For one, it's a new kind of networking architecture that would raise issues in regard to training and troubleshooting. It also made the assumption that the buildings could be daisy-chained in a physical ring topology, even though we specified a star topology. In theory, it might be possible to link the buildings in this manner by using jumpers to connect fiber at the main building, but this would significantly increase distances and negate some benefits of connecting the buildings in a true ring. For example, in a true ring, if one of the fibers were cut, there could be a redundant physical path to the next building that would maintain connectivity to the network. We're a little leery of this proprietary technology, but we would have been willing to follow up and hear more about it.
A number of Extreme's other proposals were also proprietary, and were listed in place of standards-based solutions. For example, it proposed "Extreme Networks' Software-Controlled Redundant Port" technology as a replacement for standards-based Spanning Tree Protocol (IEEE 802.1d) without mentioning the alternative RSTP (Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol, IEEE 802.1w), which Foundry claimed converged in 52 ms compared with STP's 30 to 45 seconds. No doubt Extreme believes its approach is superior--and perhaps the company is correct--but our preference is to stick with standards. It would take a lot to convince us otherwise. And, in place of 802.1x, Extreme suggested its "Network Login," system, touting its superiority. Again, it will take some convincing for us to adopt this view.
Pricing of Extreme's solution providing 100 Mbps to the desktop included its chassis-based products at the core and as aggregators in the buildings, with stackables delivering desktop connectivity. The bottom line was $590,657, comparable to the price of Foundry's stackable solution and almost twice the price of the Enterasys and Alcatel stackable proposals. The RFI revealed no reason for this imbalance.
Extreme's gigabit to the desktop scenario used chassis from end to end, and the $1,040,040 cost was comparable to those of the Foundry and Enterasys proposals.
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