Network Gear Vendors

Hi Networking sub,

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I work for a MSP/ISP that has a few data centers I help manage. We are currently a Cisco shop using Nexus 9504 Spines, 9336 Leafs, and also 93120 leafs in NX-OS mode. We also have a few ASR 9000's for our MPLS WAN between facilities.

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As of the last several months, we have had such a terrible experience with Cisco TAC support we have decided to evaluate other vendors that hopefully have better development cycles than Cisco. We have notifications of bug releases every day which is more than we're willing to tolerate at this point and we are told to upgrade every time we call in and that they don't have a specific bug ID or they just can't flat out figure out why our routers and switches suddenly stop forwarding traffic after a basic config change (such as deleting a vlan or changing a route metric).

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The feature list we use is shown below as they will be required (or something comparable) for us to proceed with a new vendor ...

Switch Requirements

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vPC (or MLAG as Arista calls it)

VXLAN

OSPFv2/3

BGP

VRF

LACP

VRRP

PIM/MSDP

Some flavor of PVST (We currently have to use MST which we don't like but must because of line card limitations)

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Router requirements

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MPLS (For both L2VPN and L3VPN) w/ TE

BGP (full internet tables)

OSPF

Rich QoS preferably with 6+ queues

BFD

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We already have some Juniper gear that we are retiring so we would rather stay away from Juniper as well as our counterparts on the ISP side have been having fits with Juniper support as well. Any other vendors are game however and we will be requesting some demo gear to put in our lab before we actually pull the trigger on a fairly large order that will be all forklift upgrades.

We intend on evaluating Arista as they have a few switches that fit the roles of what we are doing today with the Nexus gear. We're open to other router vendors as well. What other vendors do you all recommend based on experience of using their gear in your network/data centers?

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TIA,

max