Dell power connect switches.

Thu May 20 20:42:59 UTC 2004

On Thu, 20 May 2004, Joel Perez wrote:

> out there. Will this be a case of "you get what you pay for" or are they
> really good performing units?
> 
> I really have not been able to find any lists or other sources with
> comments on these units. I'd appreciate any info you guys might have.

In the low-end market it's mostly management and other software issues you 
pay for. I have an example of a 24 port 10/100 switch with dual 1000TX 
uplinks for $95 from an Taiwan manufacturer, where you get some kind of 
windows-only special management program (not telnet/snmp able).

It's still very inexpensive and they claim wire-speed and I have no reason 
to doubt it, making a 20gigsbit/s unit is not very hard today.

If you like the management interface of your Dells then they'll most 
likely perform what you need in the pure "shuffle packets"-area as long as 
you do IPv4 unicast. 

If you want to muck around with multicast, several vlans perhaps leaking
multicast from one vlan to another, private vlan edge, QoS etc, (mostly
metro ethernet stuff, for delivering triple play services to subscribers), 
then that's a whole other ballgame.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se