About 1,5 years ago we decided to go with vendor X for our campus MPLS + access switches, before we had about every vendor you can imagine, and still have most... However it seems that the vendor X doesn't really have that great local presence or partners in our area and it's a bit difficult to do more complex designs and architecture plans with them.
They were priced right and promised lot's of stuffs that really didn't happen, but the gear is solid and we've managed to migrate from flat L2 network to more routed network with MPLS and VRFs with them. Now that we have that going we're starting to think about the next steps and developing the network more. Seems that Juniper would be a good choice as the gear seems to be good and we'd have many different companies we could work with that have lot's of experience with those.
However we don't have any Juniper gear so that would add one more vendor to our network... I'm also wondering how well they would interop with others, I'm thinking quite well as we're just doing basic MPLS with L3VPNs and nothing advanced.
I'm not that worried about CLI stuff, we don't have that many people doing advanced stuff and we can always document how to do basic VLAN assignments and adding new PE's and such for every vendor. I think currently we have something like 3000 devices (routers+switches+firewalls) in the network.
What are your thoughts about running a network with multiple different vendors? Do you want to go with one or do you just pick what's the best for use case / what's the best this year? Or any other ideas? Not really asking for anything special but just trying to get some justification for myself to add Juniper to the mix :)
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