Pricing for Enterasys' 100-Mbps scenario was the second lowest of all the vendors, at $373,034. Its gigabit solution, however, was priced the second highest, at $1,043,796, just below Foundry's $1,194,265. The Enterasys gigabit-desktop setup required four models of chassis and stackables because the stackables alone do not have enough port density to support gigabit in the closet. And, though it's price was less than that of Foundry's chassis solution, unlike Foundry, Enterasys didn't have a less expensive alternative, and it used four different platforms to pull this off.
One feature of the Enterasys platform that was technically superior to Foundry's was the ability to do NAT in ASICs on the Expedition platform that is used at the core, and to aggregate wiring closets. Normally, this is done between a internal network and its Internet connection, where the speeds tend to be slower, making performance less of an issue. But if you are doing NAT on a high-speed Internet link, or for some reason are doing translations inside your network, you could probably expect better performance from the Enterasys solution. Like Foundry, Enterasys partnered with a midspan vendor to offer PoE, using Red Hawk 8000 products for this purpose.
Enterasys uses its NetSight Atlas management platform for centralized management. We were a little disappointed that it didn't support a SQL database. Pulling out management statistics and loading them into a report is much easier with a standard database. Sharing the ton of info that the management platform collects can be handy, and proprietary stores limit flexibility.
Like the other vendors, Enterasys claimed that its management would ease the configuration of things like QoS. In fact, on two of the platforms, the Matrix E7 and the Matrix N3, Enterasys also claimed to have 16 queues per port available for QoS, twice those of the other vendors. It's hard to imagine needing that many queues, but if you do, that's something to investigate. 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.
