(oh, I see you are with GitHub. Somehow I suspect you did not push for this downgrade.)
(followup to sounds: I'm not particularly pro cisco except that all-cisco lets you avoid interop problems. Since at least some of this is cisco, there's a good argument for all cisco.
I've actually used HP and Dell successfully for certain things, but only because I kept it as simple as possible.
In the past using other stuff was necessary at the high end, too, because cisco didn't provide 10GE very well, etc.
What I am against is cheaping out on your ~few aggregation switches, which I've seen other people do, when you're already spending good money on everything else. Maybe it's different once you get to Google or Facebook scale, but I've never been responsible for quite that many switches, and an extra $500-$1000 per 24 ports isn't going to kill you.
I actually prefer non-cisco substantially for routing and for security products.)
Please don't take this the wrong way – can you explain some of your experiences with Cisco?
I sense you're pretty loyal to Cisco. I've had the exact opposite experience, getting rock solid uptime and no-compromises performance from commodity hardware. My experience with Cisco is typified by the IOS command line: hard to use, even harder to hire someone who makes it easy, and every minute you feel the pull on your wallet. The one place Cisco seems to shine is at the boardroom table when negotiating contract renewals. :)
Not the person you replied to, but in my experience the other place Cisco shines (relatively speaking) is in hellish environments.
This isn't so much applicable to datacenter usage, but to serve some of our satellite offices reqires placing equipment in places that I'd rather not have to have any hardware; in these situations cisco has been much more reliable than the HP switches we migrated away from.
It's also way easier to find people with experience using Cisco equipment in "moderately complex" environments than HP/Dell/Arista/Juniper/Force10/Foundry/Extreme/etc.
(oh, I see you are with GitHub. Somehow I suspect you did not push for this downgrade.)
(followup to sounds: I'm not particularly pro cisco except that all-cisco lets you avoid interop problems. Since at least some of this is cisco, there's a good argument for all cisco.
I've actually used HP and Dell successfully for certain things, but only because I kept it as simple as possible.
In the past using other stuff was necessary at the high end, too, because cisco didn't provide 10GE very well, etc.
What I am against is cheaping out on your ~few aggregation switches, which I've seen other people do, when you're already spending good money on everything else. Maybe it's different once you get to Google or Facebook scale, but I've never been responsible for quite that many switches, and an extra $500-$1000 per 24 ports isn't going to kill you.
I actually prefer non-cisco substantially for routing and for security products.)