Alcatel-Lucent provides the OmniSwitch family of switches, providing data center switching, Ethernet & LAN switches, support for IoT and edge solutions, SDN, ruggedization and industrial-grade solutions, and WebSmart switches.
Our data management depends on the networking infrastructure and this product has provided all tools that are required. Our IT operations have been stable due to reliable security and networking services enhanced by this product. It easily identifies critical missions that may affect our operations and notify the service team for immediate action. My marketing department has discovered the most effective marketing channels that can attract more customers through a reliable internet connection.
Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.
It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.
Like said before - I think there are better solutions in the market to solve the challenge rather than a physical appliance. Functionalities are there and capabilities are available, but, in my experience, they lack the inherent capacity a cloud solutions provides. Lacking on the capacity to have the flexibility and dynamic growth Cloud platforms enable.
Most problems that face our company has been solved by an effective performance of this product. The operation and continuity of our business programs are boosted by great network connections. Alcatel company has been helpful in providing training and development guidelines where possible. The system performance has built a powerful operation base that can identify and provide solutions to business challenges. The digital working base for all our plans has been implemented.
In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.
FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.