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.
My experience since I started working with Extreme VDX has been great and everything has been working effectively. I give it 10/10 in performance since it has never failed us during our normal operations. Networking across our company and WAN has been covered by powerful fabric technologies that enhance secure and transparent business operations. It supports both wired and wireless connections with switches that network them through our applications.
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.
I once had a problem with a USB drive and had a lot of trouble fixing it. We can use more documents and a better way to recover the drive. I understand the problems that every vendor faces with proprietary software. If you are a customer, this should not be a problem.
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.
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.
