Allied Telesis road show (4/27/2011)

The lunch was great.  I did not win any door prizes.

AT has a large facility in San Jose.  Officially, they're
a Japanese company with offices world wide.  They have
their own manufacturing facility in China.

Most impressive: AT has the high performance group at
Livermore as customers.  About six guys from the lab
showed up for the event.  They own an IXIA performance
tester and have pushed enough bits through the AT
switches to say that they stand up to the traffic.
One of the LLNL guys is Joe Slaveic.

AT still main-lines 100 Mb/s switches with Gig-E uplinks.
Uplink ports are SFP.  They also make Gig-E switches and
several of their switches have L3 capability -- including
OSPF and BGP. {why you'd want that at the edge, ...}

This was not the kind of event where you'd do a deep
dive into switch details, but a review of the data sheets
and instruction manuals shows that while they have dhcp-
snooping and dhcp option-82, they do not have other L2
protections and they have nothing for IPv6 other than
managability.  So, for example, their 9000 series switches
have L2 access lists that can distinguish IPv4 ports, but 
not IPv6 ports.

AT does have stacking ports on many of their switches.
Cool feature:  Using HDMI video cables as stacking
connectors.  I like that.

AT is a fiber-to-the-home provider.  They do NOT use PON
(passive optical network) splitters but instead run
dedicated fibers to the home.  They have a showcase
installation at San Jose State.  SJ State is also
a Campus Televideo customer -- so that is who pours
the content onto the AT hardware.  I'm sure we can
get a field trip pretty much any time we want one.

-jim