The Extreme VDX series of switches (formerly Brocade VDX) was acquired by Extreme Networks in 2017 during the Broadcom acquisition of Brocade and the selling off of some of the company's assets. The products, including the latest ExtremeSwitching VDX 6740, are now discontinued.
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Huawei CloudEngine Data Center Switches
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The Huawei NetEngine series of DC switches is, the vendor states, a diversified product portfolio that supports flexible networking ranging from 500 to over 50,000 servers, with a unified open architecture that supports seamless evolution from the traditional data center network to the SDN and multi-cloud era.
The VDX is very well suited for any virtual environment; it is reliable along and easy to configure and maintain. It is great for inter-switch links on inter-cluster communication. I love our cluster configuration; allows for seamless, no downtime upgrades. It is actually fascinating to witness the upgrade; it takes about 10 minutes per chassis. This switch would not be well suited for intermediate distribution frame switching, it would be a waste of technology in an IDF!
The focus of the solution is datacenter, so it is a waste of resources to use them as SOHO or as access switches. All your robustness needs to be used correctly, so that there is no wasted investment. I also note that, as good practices, it is necessary to ensure redundancy and availability of assets and connections, so the investment is high, even more so if you need to mix fiber and twisted pair solutions.
I had issues with the USB drive once and had a devil of a time resolving. We could use a little more documentation and a better manner in which to recover the drive. I do understand the issues every vendor faces regarding proprietary software. If you are a customer, it should never be an issue.
The VDX has been a champ in my environment, if I had issues I could probably come up with additional comments.
I am glad that Extreme VDX has continued the VDX product line because it really is a phenomenal piece of hardware that was very well made.
Documentation, like every huawei product, needs improvement
The official training of this solution is extremely boring and theoretical. It is necessary to make something more practical and useful in everyday life.
As it is a line for datacenters, I believe that the product needs a better development in its chassis. It seems very fragile to me.
I have not had an opportunity to use a similar featured platform in my networking journey. All I have learned is that Extreme VDX has great potential for controlling and managing networking operations in our company. The data analytics insights that we receive from data analysis have developed great planning and decision-making infrastructure. The speed of operation is always stable with high data transfer rate.
The Huawei CloudEngine Data Center Switches solution, as the name implies, is aimed at Datacenters and ToR applications. The development of such equipment was all designed to meet high processing loads and connections of servers, storages and other high-performance assets. The other solutions evaluated (and some we even have in our park) are for other purposes, such as access and edge.
