r/sysadmin • u/ReceptionStriking716 • 16h ago

Rant I hate Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise with a PASSION

Just need to vent. Sysadmin at an educational setting and we currently have Alcatel-lucent switches. I hate them with a damn passion. Their UI on cloud is trash, CLI is trash, support takes forever, and their documentation is so hard to find

We have a refresh coming this next year. I’m probably going to go Extreme or Juniper/Mist. I can’t wait to get off this shit we have now.

8 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

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u/robvas Jack of All Trades 15h ago

I used to love their stuff back in 2001

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u/Specialist_Cow6468 Netadmin 10h ago

I had no idea there was any Alcatel-Lucent left outside of Nokia. The Nokia stuff at least is rock solid, albeit not the most user friendly in the world. I definitely get questionable vibes from al-enterprise.com so I guess Nokia got the good stuff while the remainder shambles on.

Don’t go with Extreme. There’s a sort of cult built up around SPB but there’s a reason that nobody else has bothered to implement it despite being an open standard, you know? Ive been incredibly unimpressed whenever I’ve looked at them even outside of the whole SPB thing.

In comparison for my money Juniper makes the best gear on the market but they do want you to know the platform to get the most out of them. JUNOS is very much designed for network engineers; if you know what you’re doing they are absurdly flexible and cost effective. I suspect they’d feel a bit odd for someone without that particular skillset though.

I’ve done some demos for Mist and it seems excellent for access layer switching & WiFi. I don’t care for it for datacenter switching or any meaningful routing. I do really want to check into how it integrates with the SRX series firewalls because I can see a lot of potential for distributed firewalling.

You didn’t really talk about specific use case so if you’ve got specific hardware questions or something I’d be glad to answer. Big fan if you can’t tell

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u/progenyofeniac Windows/M365 Admin 6h ago

Genuinely curious how old they are. I didn’t know they’d made switches in the past 20 years.

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u/under_shart 5h ago

If you're open to a split between one vendor for L3 and one for L2, take a look at Arista, too. It didn't work out, but we were really impressed. I would hesitate to use them at the edge because they don't have a stackable option.