Thursday, February 7, 2019

Favorite L2 FTTH metro switch

(Probably only relevant to FTTH or other service provider operators) First time poster, long time listener.

I'm interested to hear what folks prefer for FTTH L2 switches (typical deployment is in MDU settings, such as commercial office buildings or apartment complexes). Ultimately most focused in just breaking out unique port-based VLAN's and a sane CLI. These are generally uplinked to an MPLS environment with a head-end L3 BNG router - so again, not looking for a bunch of fancy functionality on the L2 access side.

My own experience is limited to Alcatel & Juniper switches, they certainly have trade-off's. The ALU stuff is fairly cheap, but the OS has memory leaks which eventually drop SNMP/SSH/telnet access but still forward packets (the most recent Dec '18 firmware appears to resolve this issue). Juniper EX is stable but a bit expensive and is clearly a campus product line. A quick break down of desired functionality:

Required...

  • SFP/SFP+ with DDM exposure (have optics, can program to match any vendor DRM sillyness)
  • ZTP - unattended firmware & configuration fetching
  • Q-in-Q (double stacking of VLAN tags)
  • RSTP
  • LLDP

Nice to have...

  • ERPS / G.8032 "ring" support
  • modern SSH (v2 w/ key support)
  • stacking support (mainly to make field tech install work easier)
  • OAM
  • Private VLAN (hide mgmt network for CPE's)
  • RADIUS
  • IPv6 mgmt (SSH, SNMP, NTP)
  • IGMP snooping
  • NETCONF/RESTCONF or any idempotent mechanism for deploying configuration changes

A couple models compared... these very from metro ethernet / service provider focused, to WISP, and even SMB/enterprise geared products:

Vendor / Model Street $USD Specs (latest firmware release)
Alcatel-Lucent OS6450-U24X $1,650 22 SFP-X, 2 SFP+, w/ stacking module (Dec '18)
Mikrotik CRS328-4C-20S-4S+RM $350 20 SFP-X, 4 SFP+ (Feb '19)
Dell 8024F $1,000 24 SFP+ (Dec '18)
Planet Technology MGSW-28240F $1,000 24 SFP-X, 4 SFP+ (Nov '16)
Cisco (Small Business) SG350XG-24F $2,200 24 SFP+ (Nov '18)
Juniper EX4300-32F $2,200 32 SFP-X, 4 SFP+, 2 QSFP+ (Dec '18)

Much appreciate feedback, thank you!



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