There's also another factor: you may not have any idea whose rebranded switch you're getting when you buy a Dell switch. Maybe it's Foundry in batch X, but it might not be in batch Y.
Is there any evidence that this happens within a model? I find it hard to believe. I can see differences from one model to the next, but from one batch to the next? When they went from the 5224 to the 5324, I believe that was a mfr changeout, but it was accompanied by a new model number. I hear your paranoia though. ;-) By the way, I know that for a while, Foundry wasn't building their own low-end switches, which was how that Foundry 24G model came to be... are they still doing that, or did they start making their own gear again? I've had some old FWS24's for maybe 15 years and the one thing I can say is that the stuff just doesn't seem to fail, even though I don't really have a good use for them anymore. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.