I always said that Nortel had great products but terrible marketing.
Now that Avaya owns the data portfolio, there is some strong marketing and investment taking place within that portfolio.
Over the course of the next few weeks industry analysts reports will be hitting the street providing updates on the switching, routing and communication portfolios. I hope to share a few of them here.
Here is the first one to hit the street.
Current Analysis Inc. (http://www.currentanalysis.com) recently (June 15th) completed a switching analysis report on Avaya 5000 Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) series.
Report Summary
The report provides details and market comparisons on the 5000 series lineup, including 5500 and 5600 series ERS. The analysis highlights Avaya’s market advantages such as MLT (Multi-Link Trunking), SMLT (Split Multi-Link Trunking) and DMLT (Distributed Multi-Link Trunking).
Features no doubt that any data engineer can argue are market leading; fault tolerance, resilience, multi-path redundancy and most importantly provide sub-second fail-over as well as extremely fast network re-convergence (the real test), all are key leading attributes when deploying a network requiring speed and high resiliency and up-time (indignant of VOIP networks).
The report also points to Avaya’s FAST (Flexible Advanced Stacking Technology 144Gbps/unit – 5600, and 80Gbps/unit – 5500) as a market advantage, and when combining multiple models in a stack providing investment protection (i.e. adding new 5600s to an existing 5500 stack).
When stacking multiple 5500 series switches together i.e. 5600 and 5500 the switch stack will default to the lower speed back-plane, so in this case 80Gbp
Current Analysis Inc. also touches on the old Nortel in-efficiencies in marketing and poor public documentation as contributing to Nortel’s lack of substantial market awareness in such a great product. They go on to state now, that under the Avaya corporation, the Ethernet switching portfolio is being invested in heavily, both in financially and in a marketing perspective, helping to assert Avaya’s solid platform within the market.
5500 ERS Series Strengths
Strength’s identified by Current Analysis in their report:
- Avaya investment and revitalization
- bandwidth; better than any other solution in switching and stacking
- MLT, SMLT, DMLT – Redundant path fail-over, Rapid re-convergence, multi-path redundancy
- higher level of availability for networks supporting VOIP
- Top of rack leader
- Automatic stack configuration
- Power supply redundancy and great POE support
5500 ERS Series Overview
The full report provides further rating and metrics on, Buying and Selection Criteria, Management and Ease of Use, Performance Metrics, Port Diversity, Scalability, and TCO. All rating very high from in their report >=3stars.
A VERY positive report, positioning the 5500 series portfolio as STRONG both from cost effective, speed and TCO perspective.
Combat has provided our customers with over 3million ports; installed, supported and maintained, over the past 8 years.
We have invested our knowledge and company in the portfolio, as well a tell our customers about the product efficiencies, and capabilities. We have and continue to strongly believe in the Avaya (xNortel) switching portfolio.
With Avaya’s procurement of Nortel Enterprise division, and as a Avaya partner we have begun to see a new (refreshing) interest and investment into the data portfolio. It is especially great to see industry analysts reports and ratings of the portfolio very positive and in some cases – market leading!
As an Avaya specialist and partner we (Combat) are very happy to see the renewed market response and investment, and we are happy to know that our recommendation to our customers has been and continues to be – a leading one.
Keep going Avaya.
(to get the full report, visit http://www.currentanalysis.com)
- Adam DaCosta.
About Adam DaCosta
I thoroughly enjoy technology and in particular communication technology. Unification of voice, video and data, and how technology can enable and provide users and organizations the ability to communicate more effectively. Connect with me through this blog, Twitter(@adamdacosta) or Check out my about.me profile!, I look forward to hearing from you!
