Looking for switch recommendations ...

[Anthony Anderberg]

I just finished evaluating a large number of switches 
for work and can share my thoughts, although we're 
still in price negotiations so it'd be unethical to 
make recommendations.  

We use Nortel BayStack 350s and Passport 8600s today, 
and will be buying almost 400 switches of various kinds 
over the next 3 years.  We only use managed switches, 
having spent too many hours debugging speed/duplex 
mismatches and other silliness.   I tend not to pay much 
attention to vendor-supplied performance number since 
there is a lot of "Enron-style" math that can be done to 
boost ratings.

In the small form-factor market I liked:
-Allied Telesyn's 8012M Unlike most of the switches 
in this group it has a fan, but its not too loud.  
It also seemed to run fine without the fan (nothing 
drives like a rental!)  It's got a modular slot that 
can accept GBICs or a 1000TX port, otherwise it's 
got 12 10/100 ports.
-Asante's FM2008 is fairly inexpensive and had 
decent performance for it's 8 ports.  A model with 
a fiber uplink is also available.
-Cisco's 2940 is basically a cut-down 2950 and has 
a number of mounting options, although its list 
price is twice that of these other small switches.

In my "10/100 user uplink" category I liked:
-Notel's BayStack 425 which is the least expensive 
managed switch they make, it's got 4 SFP slots but 
a cheesy firewire stacking system.
-Hewlett Packard's ProCurve 2626 which has 2 SFP 
slots, 24 ports, and lots of nice features for port 
mirroring.  Someone mentioned the 48 port version 
called the 2650 earlier.
-Cisco's 2950 Which has decent performance and a 
reasonable price, although I've always thought IOS 
to be a clunky interface for simple Ethernet switches 
where not much configuration is required.

In the gigabit category I liked:
-Hewlett Packard's 2824: which has 20 copper ports and 
4 ports that can be either copper or SFP.   It's got many 
of the same features and look and feel as the 2626.
-Nortel's 5510 which is their newest model, its got a rich 
feature set including neat flow and cable management that'll 
be in an upcoming software release.  There is also going to 
be a PoE version later this year.

I also looked at switches from Dell, Extreme, and Foundry, 
as well as models from each vendor in each category. 
Dell and Foundry's workgroup switches are both clones 
of a switch from some other OEM, I'm not sure who. 
Hewlett Packard's 9300 line is really just Foundry's 
stuff with HP stickers, they don't even bother to repaint 
them.  I really liked Extreme's core hardware, but thought 
they were a little too expensive as an edge solution. 
I'm hopeing to get me hands on Extreme's BlackDiamond 
10K platform later this summer, even if it is based on Linux.
  :-)

Hope this helps,
anthony