RE: Switch advice please - followup
Thanks to everyone for their advice and stories. It seems the popular choice is Cisco with a close second of foundry. Even a nice mention of Dell switches. Most people had nothing good to say about HP. (phew.. glad I asked you all) I completely forgot abt Foundry so they are my next stop! Oddly no one mentioned 3com. I don't know if that's good or bad. The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter intuitive interface known to man. We currently have several 3550's and one that is still partially brain dis-functional after a "senior network engineer" at a hosting facility got a-hold of it to "help out". To be honest I miss Ascend. Nice interfaces with actual menu's and interface for those of us who don't need 50 ways to do something or only find they need to touch their switches once a year for upgrades or whatever. You could at least wander through the menu's to figure out/remind yourself what to do. If anyone makes a switch with this type of menuing that can actually pass lots of bits well and is not a consumer toy. I want to know :) Thanks everyone! Nicole
Hello I am looking at acquiring some switches to upgrade a large web site front and back-end switching network.
I am looking at cisco and HP switches at the moment and would like to hear peoples opinions on them or recommendations for any others.
Some of the switches I am looking at are 24 and 48 Port GB (copper) switches and 48 and 24 port 10/100 with GB feed's. (one or two feeds)
Also if anyone makes a small (like 8 port) GB switch with GB that routes fast enough to act as a gateway from Gb fiber drop to copper GB feed to other switches. Most of the small switches seem underpowered for such a task. Or am I wrong in this?
Thanks so much!
Nicole
The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter intuitive interface known to man.
Guess you've never used Nortel..... :) ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
On 7/22/2005 2:39 PM, Nicole wrote:
completely forgot abt Foundry so they are my next stop!
Don't forget Extreme, my favorite of old. Their product line isn't as broad as some others but they have pretty solid stuff in my experience.
Oddly no one mentioned 3com. I don't know if that's good or bad.
3Com has a history of abandoning and re-entering markets (only to be outdone by Intel), and that works against them. Their 5500 series looks pretty nice (gigE + PoE) and has a competitive price point, but I haven't played with any of it.
The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS.
If anyone makes a switch with this type of menuing that can actually pass lots of bits well and is not a consumer toy. I want to know :)
The linksys gigE switches (like the SRW2024) have a menuing interface and a web interface. No layer3 support but they have a pretty complete L2 feature set. Not sure how you feel about buying at that market level. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
Thanks to everyone for their advice and stories. It seems the popular choice is Cisco with a close second of foundry. Even a nice mention of Dell switches. Most people had nothing good to say about HP. (phew.. glad I asked you all) I completely forgot abt Foundry so they are my next stop! Oddly no one mentioned 3com. I don't know if that's good or bad.
The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter intuitive interface known to man. We currently have several 3550's and one that is still partially brain dis-functional after a "senior network engineer" at a hosting facility got a-hold of it to "help out".
To be honest I miss Ascend. Nice interfaces with actual menu's and interface for those of us who don't need 50 ways to do something or only find they need to touch their switches once a year for upgrades or whatever. You could at least wander through the menu's to figure out/remind yourself what to do.
If anyone makes a switch with this type of menuing that can actually pass lots of bits well and is not a consumer toy. I want to know :)
Nortel? 3Com aren't too bad. From memory Nortel are actually better at higher throughput levels. Nortel has a GUI Device Management system via SNMP which is pretty good. They also have intuitive HTTP access for most things and the console gives you a menu or a commandline option. Look at the Nortel 5510/5520/5530 switches for Gigabit throughput... Mark.
On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 11:01:10AM +1200, Mark Foster wrote:
Nortel has a GUI Device Management system via SNMP which is pretty good. They also have intuitive HTTP access for most things and the console gives you a menu or a commandline option.
Hell, why not use Cisco's web interface? ;) John
Device manger is nice, however the code/hardware isn't, sorry I'm biast, were a nortel shop... :) Nortel? 3Com aren't too bad. From memory Nortel are actually better at higher throughput levels. Nortel has a GUI Device Management system via SNMP which is pretty good. They also have intuitive HTTP access for most things and the console gives you a menu or a commandline option. Look at the Nortel 5510/5520/5530 switches for Gigabit throughput... Mark. --------------------------------- Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
At 02:39 PM 7/22/2005, Nicole wrote:
The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter intuitive interface known to man.
Really? I find Cisco's CLI in IOS to be one of the best out there and very intuitive. After years of working on Cisco routers and mostly CatOS on Catalyst switches, when I started using IOS on Catalyst switches, it made a lot more sense to me (than CatOS did at first) and I was able to pick it up very quickly. CatOS makes sense in it's own right, but I still prefer IOS. Maybe it's just the years of using it that make me feel at home. :)
We currently have several 3550's and one that is still partially brain dis-functional after a "senior network engineer" at a hosting facility got a-hold of it to "help out".
And that's the switch's or an IOS fault? ;) Vinny Abello Network Engineer Server Management vinny@tellurian.com (973)300-9211 x 125 (973)940-6125 (Direct) PGP Key Fingerprint: 3BC5 9A48 FC78 03D3 82E0 E935 5325 FBCB 0100 977A Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com (888)TELLURIAN "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear" -- Mark Twain
participants (6)
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Eric A. Hall -
John Kinsella -
Jon Lyons -
Mark Foster -
Nicole -
Vinny Abello