who is making dells switches these days?

[Zargon]

the price/feature set on the PowerConnect 6224 is really nice, but we have some older ones that have ports that disable themself and they never even released a firmware update for them.

with 3com gone its dell hp or cisco I guess unless someone has a better idea. and I have forking out the $$ for cisco

 

[drebo]

HP has kept 3Com's product line alive, but rebranded. You'll notice that there's now two lines of ProCurves...ones with a lifetime warranty (real procurves) and ones with a 3 year warranty (rebranded 3com switches).

My advice would be to not use Dell switches. I've had many problems with them. They're not worth it.

 

[Zargon]

HP has kept 3Com's product line alive, but rebranded. You'll notice that there's now two lines of ProCurves...ones with a lifetime warranty (real procurves) and ones with a 3 year warranty (rebranded 3com switches).

My advice would be to not use Dell switches. I've had many problems with them. They're not worth it.

thats the way I was leaning.(not buying the dells)

 

[Emulex]

Procurve is the bottom of the barrel in the world of switching. use nothing below procurve! They have some new product that is not that great (1810G-24) but for light traffic but DELL doesn't even recommend their iscsi switches for iscsi lol. that says something.

I am procurve certified and i'll tell you what - the good - really good switches are not cheap. they are on price parity with cisco but come with free software and lifetime warranty which is more comprehensive than the cisco (i'm certified too).

the lines are very blurred now that cisco owns and sells the junk linksys line. And then there is 3c0m - i've got a stack of old switches sitting in a pile - no thanks - but i do like their tippingpoint product for IPS - it's quite heavily discounted (trained on that too).

Cisco's 2960S has a great stacking option where their stackwise is capable of expanding your 48 to 96 port - it's not cheap - but the procurve equivalent doesn't exist.

procurve has a few strange switches - modular - that are blocking (not enough backbone for a full chassis) - avoid those!

my favorite is the 2510G-48 - cheap and i'm pushing iscsi and backbone traffic over many of them. However for production ISCSI i move up to the 2910AL-24/48 line. this is where it gets really expensive

 

[Zargon]

Procurve is the bottom of the barrel in the world of switching. use nothing below procurve! They have some new product that is not that great (1810G-24) but for light traffic but DELL doesn't even recommend their iscsi switches for iscsi lol. that says something.

I am procurve certified and i'll tell you what - the good - really good switches are not cheap. they are on price parity with cisco but come with free software and lifetime warranty which is more comprehensive than the cisco (i'm certified too).

the lines are very blurred now that cisco owns and sells the junk linksys line. And then there is 3c0m - i've got a stack of old switches sitting in a pile - no thanks - but i do like their tippingpoint product for IPS - it's quite heavily discounted (trained on that too).

Cisco's 2960S has a great stacking option where their stackwise is capable of expanding your 48 to 96 port - it's not cheap - but the procurve equivalent doesn't exist.

procurve has a few strange switches - modular - that are blocking (not enough backbone for a full chassis) - avoid those!

my favorite is the 2510G-48 - cheap and i'm pushing iscsi and backbone traffic over many of them. However for production ISCSI i move up to the 2910AL-24/48 line. this is where it gets really expensive

yeah thats mostly way over my needs and some over my head.

I am replacing some older gigabit dells and some really old cisco 2900's(10/100)

I need managability/vlan stuff, and gigabit

I dont need high bandwidth stacking, but it would be nice.

I have 12 or so 3com 4200g's in another building that have been *bulletproof* for the last few years. hence why I like them.

some spent some time in way less than ideal conditions too

I know you can get better switches, but the price/features I needed they met well.

I used some of the SMB linksys by cisco stuff, and I wont do that again. half of them got rma'd in the first year

 

[Agamar]

Hmm, you guys have had issues with the Dell switches? I have 10 Dell PowerConnect 3548P (POE) switches, 2 6248 (Layer 3) switches, and 6 5448 (iSCSI) switches, and have never lost a port on a single one of them. The 6248's are the oldest, at almost 4 years old now.

Dell has been very supportive of the 6200 series. They just came out with the new software to enable sFlow on the switch, so now I can monitor traffic based on the protocol, like I do on our Cisco routers with NetFlow.

I have worked with all Cisco in the past, and was very skeptical about using Dell, but with a limited budget, I had to try. I can absolutely say that I was impressed.

 

[drebo]

I have several Dell PoE switches, and I have had to cease using any managed features at all on them. They would randomly forget that ports were trunk ports and bring down an entire network.

I would choose HP over Dell in a heartbeat.

 

[Emulex]

dell imitates but never innovates - that is their problem. really you guys gotta know the secret sauce is that you can get all three at near price parity with some hard work. lol. gotta put some thumbs to your salesrep and quit buying at screen price.

 

[Gillbot]

Telco Systems?
http://www.telco.com/na/index/en/products

(I know NOTHING about switches, I just got one for a song on ebay once and that thing was a BEAST!)

 

[Nothinman]

dell imitates but never innovates - that is their problem. really you guys gotta know the secret sauce is that you can get all three at near price parity with some hard work. lol. gotta put some thumbs to your salesrep and quit buying at screen price.

Yea, Dell got big by being cheap, not good.

 

[imagoon]

dell imitates but never innovates - that is their problem. really you guys gotta know the secret sauce is that you can get all three at near price parity with some hard work. lol. gotta put some thumbs to your salesrep and quit buying at screen price.

I don't call buying shells and slapping your logo on it imitations either. Dell as a company by itself has basically zero R&D. Everything Dell sells is someone elses with a Dell logo.

IE they do not build a single switch. Or storage (SAN / NAS) unit for that matter.

 

[Cable God]

For the same price range as the 6224, price Juniper EX 3200 or 4200. Don't look at the suggested retail or internet vendor pricing. Talk to a partner.

 

[cmetz]

I don't know who Dell's ODM is, but it is my understanding that the chipset is Marvell and the software is from Radware, who got bought by Marvell. I would be very surprised if the board design differs substantially from Marvell's reference design.

Earlier Dell switches were Broadcom chipset and my experience with those was substantially better than my experience with their current products. I would say the same thing about their current networking products as I would for their other current products - they have their place in the market, and as long as you are getting them for cheap and using the cheap solution is appropriate for the problem, they will meet those expectations.

In my opinion, today, business critical = Cisco or Juniper. Force10 can't quite succeed or fail, and Arista is worth watching, but that's about it. Extreme, Foundry, Riverstone/Enterasys, and 3Com are no longer interesting. HP networking is busy digesting 3Com and their product line is currently a mess that I would avoid until that process sorts itself out.

I haven't really been able to find a current low-end switch I like

 

[Emulex]

hp 2510g-48 is a great low end switch with power, warranty, support.

it can handle 45 boxens sending backups at the same time to another switch (dual uplink). uptime is when i power it up - no crashing etc. solid. i only do full bare metal backups - no incrementals - thank the lord for huge 2TB drive arrays

hp procurve is unique that it has an easy to use web interface and command line interface that pretty much is the same as IOS lol. so if you know ios you know procurve. if you can't figure something out with ? go use the web interface.

 

[sketchy00]

Procurve is the bottom of the barrel in the world of switching. use nothing below procurve! They have some new product that is not that great (1810G-24) but for light traffic but DELL doesn't even recommend their iscsi switches for iscsi lol. that says something.

I am procurve certified and i'll tell you what - the good - really good switches are not cheap. they are on price parity with cisco but come with free software and lifetime warranty which is more comprehensive than the cisco (i'm certified too).

the lines are very blurred now that cisco owns and sells the junk linksys line. And then there is 3c0m - i've got a stack of old switches sitting in a pile - no thanks - but i do like their tippingpoint product for IPS - it's quite heavily discounted (trained on that too).

Cisco's 2960S has a great stacking option where their stackwise is capable of expanding your 48 to 96 port - it's not cheap - but the procurve equivalent doesn't exist.

procurve has a few strange switches - modular - that are blocking (not enough backbone for a full chassis) - avoid those!

my favorite is the 2510G-48 - cheap and i'm pushing iscsi and backbone traffic over many of them. However for production ISCSI i move up to the 2910AL-24/48 line. this is where it gets really expensive

I had just purchased a stack of 4 Procurve 2910al switches. Pretty much the worst switch I've ever worked with. There is no way I'm putting these things into production. They should be called out on their definition of "stacking." Terrible, and not redundant. And even when stacked, in no way does it create a logical extension of 1 switch. I've LAG'd cheap powerconnects, and resulted in way more functionality than what these 2910al's had. I have not had experience with HP's more expensive offerings, but I hope to heck they are better than the pieces of junk they call full layer 3 stacking switches.

 

[robmurphy]

We use the Cisco SMB SF/SG 300 series switches.

So far we have had 1 problem with them and Cisco quickly released a firmware update for that. The switches are managed by web interface, and have all the options you will usually need (VLAN, LAG, ACL, STP ect).

Most of the switches come with 1 or 2 ports that can use SFPs or RJ45.

The range of switches has POE and non POE versions.

The switches can also do L3 switching at wire speed.

The warranty and support pretty much as good as the HP procurves.

These switches are very different from the older Linksys switches. Cisco spent a great deal to produce the SMB range and did not just re-brand the older Linksys ones.

People keep referring to these as re-branded Linksys, and it makes me wonder if they have every tried one of these.

Rob

 

[Nothinman]

We use the Cisco SMB SF/SG 300 series switches.

So far we have had 1 problem with them and Cisco quickly released a firmware update for that. The switches are managed by web interface, and have all the options you will usually need (VLAN, LAG, ACL, STP ect).

Most of the switches come with 1 or 2 ports that can use SFPs or RJ45.

The range of switches has POE and non POE versions.

The switches can also do L3 switching at wire speed.

The warranty and support pretty much as good as the HP procurves.

These switches are very different from the older Linksys switches. Cisco spent a great deal to produce the SMB range and did not just re-brand the older Linksys ones.

People keep referring to these as re-branded Linksys, and it makes me wonder if they have every tried one of these.

Rob

I hate those things. We have a client with a few of them and it easily took me 5x as long to gather all of the configuration information from them because there's no standard IOS cli.

 

[robmurphy]

The whole point of Cisco's SMB range is that it does not use IOS!.

The config can be backed up to a text file, which you can edit if you want. I often do this as I have a standard config template which I edit for each new install. This means the switch is configured before it goes to the customer site, and we have a record of its config. If remote changes are made the config is backed up, and kept locally. This means if the switch did fail we can supply a replacement with the same config very quickly. If the replacement goes straight to site an engineer can load the new config in a couple of minutes.

Rob