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
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.
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...
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".
