Im curious Korp;

In your humble opinion, what stinks about cisco switches. I for one will be the first to tell you that they are not the best switches with respect to performance. I personally was involved in stress testing 2 other vendors against Cisco's high end 6500 switches.

However our results were based soley on performance under extreme and I mean extreme conditions, which with the backplane of today's switches, you "may" never reach a saturation point. I've used the IXIA and Smartbit traffic generators for the "bakeoff".

Three vendors tested were Cisco, Extreme, and Foundary.
Extreme came in first running at wire speed, Cisco was a very close second, and foundary at a dead last.


Now back to my point;
Other things to consider when choosing a vendor are:
1) cost
2) Interoperability
3) features supported
4) mangement
5) support (where Cisco blows the competition in this area)
6) robustness (how buggy the IOS is. Ive worked a lot with the Alpine, Black diamond and Summit48i Extreme switches..And they are in my opinion not as stable as the Cisco Switches.They are, however cheaper.)

Im sure it may be debated, but all in all from my experience, taking all of the above into consideration and having worked with 3Com, Cisco, Extreme and Foundary; I find Cisco to be premier...I am strictly speaking for use in large enterprise network.. Not pop and mom shops..




Just an FYi
Some of the Extreme founders were former Cisco employees. Just as was the case with Juniper whose routers outperform cisco's high end routers and are slowly creeping up all over ISP backbones. It too was started by ex Cisco employees.



Also, if anything, I would argue Cisco's routers are worse than their switches....A lot less stable...