RE: Anyone used Adtran NetVanta 1544?

["Blake T. Pfankuch" <blake () pfankuch me>]

We use Adtran switches semi-frequently at work and I have a few pain points, but many good things about them.

My biggest complaint is the availability of support if you need something from them.  They operate under pseudo 
standard business hours which can be a deal breaker for some.  

Obviously AOS is very similar to IOS in the syntax which is a plus, minor little differences which drive you nuts when 
you switch back and forth with cisco and Adtran all day, however with some of the more advanced switching functions I 
find them a little lacking.  When we have used these for smaller VMware deployments we traditionally build port 
channels to the VMware hosts for the data connections, and the port channel load balance methods available are a little 
lacking. 

Past that I don't mind them one bit, and actually push for an Adtran over a low end HP/3Com web managed switch when the 
customer doesn't want to pony up for Cisco gear.  For the price you cant beat the configuration simplicity for the IOS 
aware people, and the webUI for end users is not that bad.  You can't completely mangle the switch config from webUI by 
mistake anymore which most would consider a bonus...
 
If you are looking at integrating multiple of these devices and building port channels between them, I would highly 
recommend manually specifying the spanning tree priority on the device.  6 months from now when you reboot a switch for 
an AOS upgrade it might come back up and you end up bringing down the entire network.  I've now seen the 3 times on 
production networks now which are pushing the limits of the SMB NetVanta switches imo.

"Show run verbose" will become a close friend :)  and make sure you document the crap out of everything you set up :)

Also make sure you are getting the G2 switches they are about 1000 times better than the G1 switches.  You can actually 
get 2 of these in 1u and either stack them or vrrp them for more seamless failover.  Feel free to ping me off list if 
you have more questions, I can outline some of the deployments we have used them for, issues I have seen on individual 
cases and where I have seen them work well.

Blake Pfankuch

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Nakamura [mailto:zeusdadog () gmail com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 10:39 AM
To: NANOG
Subject: Anyone used Adtran NetVanta 1544?

Has anyone have experience using Adtran NetVanta 1544 as a iSCSI SAN switch?  Or any Adtran switch in general?  Any 
problems or unexpected issues?

Thanks!