drebo,
>I've used the Dell PowerConnect switches now in a couple of installs and have found them to be surprisingly robust. They're FAR cheaper than either Cisco or HP switches, and a little known fact about them is that they're actually manufactured by the same company that makes Cisco's switches.
Oh, really? This is news to me. Of course, I don't know anything about switch manufacturing. Could you please educate me? What company makes Dell's switches? What company makes Cisco's switches? Does each company make all of the switches?
(I thought the 3750s were built by Flex....?)
And regardless of who manufactures them, do they have the same parts inside?
For that matter, now, if you're buying Dell, why not buy SMC? You're getting the same thing, cheaper. Better support, too.
LuckyTaxi,
AFAIK Netgear doesn't manufacture anything. My understanding is that SMC, Netgear, and Dell switches are all manufactured by the same ODM and based on the usual suspect commodity chipsets. Netgear and Dell do change their ODMs from generation to generation and potentially could within, so this can and will change. SMC is a subsidiary of an ODM and is unlikely to do business elsewhere.
ZeroIQ, there's an important difference between an enterprise environment and a home/small business environment, one that I would use as the basis for your argument with your manager. In an enteprise environment, man time costs money. Your man-time, and wasted staff man-time due to outages. That means:
1. If the cheaper device is more likely to fail, the lost staff productivity will usually more than eat your cost savings. What's the cost for every hour of your network NOT working? It's usually not pretty.
2. If the cheaper device just takes a few more hours of *your* time fighting with tech support, that will usually eat your cost savings. With Dell in particular, I can't tell you how many times I've run into this particular problem. It costs more man-time to get their Indian "award winning" tech support to actually replace a switch for me than the #$!@%#$ thing cost to begin with.
3. If the cheaper device is replaced with a new generation in six months, now your network staff has to manage two different units with subtle differences. That increases the operational expense of managing the switches. One thing I give Cisco credit for, they're very reasonable about letting you know when products are going to hit end of life, giving you 6-12 months to figure out what to do. Dell just rejects your order one day and tells you that you now have to buy a different model.
4. Cisco will sell you a solution to any networking problem, and more often than not the UI for one product is about the same IOS or IOS-like CLI as is on another product. What that means is that if you drink their kool-aid, you can have one vendor to source from and a fairly consistent management UI to learn across most if not all of your network gear. For a medium enterprise enviroment, this can be a big win. You don't have the ability to train on a bunch of different things and dealing with a bunch of different vendors is a drain on limited IT people. (in some fairness, the Dell / SMC switches have a mostly-Cisco-like CLI that is closer to switch IOS as, say, CatOS)
spikespiegal, the Cisco ecosystem is big, just like the Microsoft ecosystem. You have some real wizards out there who can make their products do amazing things and *keep doing them without ongoing care and feeding*. But guess what? There are a lot more bozos who took a CCNP course, passed the exam, and now wander like locusts from company to company doing as much damage as good. Most people in enterprise networking (or server admins, or.. you get the idea) don't know as much as they need to in order to do their job really right, they know as much as they need to in order to make it seem to work today and iterate. Hence, you have a lot of shops that mostly work... but, man, how did that *ever* work right to begin with?
This part is Cisco's fault (just like MS) - they've created this whole ecosystem and optimized it to sell and keep selling. Not to optomize for solving the customer's problem and keeping it solved.
But dumping Cisco isn't the solution here - it's proper vetting of these "Cisco certified" IT people. Most of them are just bozos, and would do damage no matter what gear you give them.
And even if you do everything right, then there's the Windows IT people and users on your network. spidey07's right on the money - those bozos don't understand the network, so when they screw up, they blame the network. And you have to be able to either demonstrate that it's not, or kluge the network to work around their incompetence. Your job is to make things work, and often that accountability comes without the authority to fire the problem children.