[BBLISA] Cisco versus Dell switches

[Nicholas Kathmann]

I had similar problems with the Dell switches.  When Blaster / Nachi hit 
way back when, we were the WAN hub of communications.  Only 6 systems on 
the local LANs were infected, but every one of the sites connected to us 
had major infections.  Just the ICMP traffic through the small WAN 
circuits was enough to lock up every one of the Dell switches, including 
the ones built into the Poweredge 1655MC blades.  They had to be powered 
down then powered up, which meant in the blades, someone had to 
physically go to the back of the racks and pull the switch modules out 
one by one.  Dell was aware of the problem back then, but didn't have a 
resolution for it.  When the Dell blades were decommissioned 3 years 
later, out of curiosity I decided to check again, and still no updates.  
That's my major grudge with Dell switches.

Depending on how many you plan on deploying and for what, Cisco has some 
really nice features that you will probably not want to live without.  
The main one for me is VTP (VLAN Trunk Protocol), which is a Cisco 
proprietary protocol that communicates the VLAN info back to all of the 
switches.  This means that if you have many switches (even into the 
1000+ range), you can create the VLAN once, in one place, and have all 
of the switches immediately pick it up.  Other options like the features 
for Cisco NAC (Network Admission Control) etc are built into many of 
their switches, the Cisco IP Phones use the auxilary VLAN info from the 
Cisco switches to get their voice VLAN configurations, the Cisco 
wireless APs and wireless IP phones use CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) 
to get their VLAN info, etc.  If you are planning on having a large 
network with many different mediums served, I would stick with all 
Cisco.  If you are going to have just one or two switches, even with 
heavy NFS traffic, Dell is probably fine.  If you need multiple switches 
with the ability to scale, I would go with Cisco.

Thanks,
Nick

Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> Hey everyone.  I know cisco is better; that's not the question.  The
> question is - is cisco better in any of the ways I will care about.  Enough
> to outweigh the extra cost.  I'm comparing 24port managed gigabit, against
> 24port managed gigabit.
>
> If I buy the cisco, I am sure the switches will be stable, and remain
> operational, I can safely assume they continue doing their job at all times
> with pure trust.  Until the switch suffers some total failure, and I RMA the
> device.  I am prepared to face the risk that cisco RMA is 4 hour, while Dell
> RMA is NBD.
>
> But in the past (2002) I had problems with Dell switches that would crash.
> I was in a company that used experimental network hardware, but now it's
> unclear if the cause was the switches or the experimental network hardware.
> It's also unclear if there was a problem back in 2002, which is now
> resolved.
>
> Does anyone use Dell switches, can you say you're able to work without
> problems in general?  You're able to put some heavy NFS traffic across the
> network, and the switches don't unexplainedly crash? 
>
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