Jeremy,
I would have to strongly disagree with you on many of your points below:
First I have had experience running a 200 router network, made fully of
Bay BCN/BNX's. This network was running OSPF, with several areas, and
route aggregation. When the network was first implemented, we had some
problems, however Bay was quick to resolve them.
In addition, I have seen several case of Bay routers BGP peering, with
Cisco's. This is a fairly straight forward thing to do (now), and Bay
could
probably give you a white paper describing any potential differences
they
have with Cisco.
As for not supporting SNMP, that is simply crap, I have written SNMP
code to pull many thousand entry route tables, and while this did have
performance implications, most routers have performance implications
when doing lot's of SNMP. I would throw away site manager (Bay's
SNMP Manager), and learn the MIB if I had a large Bay network.
Yes I would agree you have to have a good understanding of the MIB.
But, I would add that with a Cisco you have to have a good understanding
of IOS.
Generally, I think Cisco has a stronger software platform, Bay a
stronger
hardware platform, but both are viable options, depending on your
environment. Could you be running some 5.xx series code?
Haven't we beat this Bay/Cisco thing to death yet...
Thanks.
David Whipple.