Moin
Seeking for experienced advice in effort to get the most educated purchase shot.
We are small IT-consultancy and upgrading our backbone to 25G and possibility to go 100Gbe as soon as there would be nice deal. I aim at used market mostly to get best deal for the buck, but we want something that is at least getting regular firmware updates in near future. Easy access to firmware updates is important. Our nodes are all 25Gbe Mellanox Cards (Connect-X 4 and Connect-X 5). We will need to interconnect with some Mikrotiks, so need something that is not picky on the DAC brand.
I got few sub-2k deals on ebay for 2nd hand 25G and 100G switches and after much comparison, the choice is now between Dell S5148F (48x 25Gbe + 6x100Gbe Cavium) and Arista DCS-7060CX-32S (32x100Gbe, Tomahawk), Arista being just a bit more expensive.
On port budget, we are fitting into both, Arista will be even almost empty, and cabling Dell will likely cost us more (DAC per port for Dell vs for Arista we will need much fewer QFSP28 splitters)
All in all I tend to favor Arista more, partly because it's cheaper cabling, partly because Cavium is killed, partly because I had bad experience with Dell switches in general (X- series). However with Arista, I feel it may be overkill.
As for firmware both are open for me: for Dell the open question is getting OS10 updates, for Arista the problem is getting EOS updates. Both seem to require some sort of registration and proof of contract, that I want to avoid, a bit afraid to also buy non-updatable iron
Anyone favors one over another? Is there better option to look at, even if it'll cost slightly more? Appreciate any other advices
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