[c-nsp] Switch/router recommendations?

[David Coulson]

Maybe my experience is different - When I had an issue, I got it 
escalated to the guys who write the code who got into my switches and 
debugged it for me. No e-mailing dumps back and forth. We're running 
their release code on some switches and engineering releases on the 
others, and we've not had problems.

The code ~9 months ago was crappy - I'd give you that. It has improved 
significantly since then.

Ed Ravin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 06:31:48PM -0400, David Coulson wrote:
>   
>> We've had good success with the Netgear GSM7328S switches. 1U (but 
>> pretty deep) with 24 10/100/1000 ports (4 SFP ports) and lots of L3 
>> features (OSPF, VRRP, Dot1q, etc). Probably sub-$2k if you buy it from 
>> the right place. We push 100Mbit+ through a pair of them, and they don't 
>> blink.
>>     
>
> The best thing I can say about a Netgear GSM73xx switch I worked with
> last year was that it rebooted very quickly, much faster than any Cisco
> I've ever met.
>
> It had a tendency to reboot while it was running at heavy load and
> you entered silly commands on the CLI like "list interfaces".  This
> was with the latest firmware.  Netgear support seems to be completely,
> completely hopeless.  I filed the problem on their web site, including
> the crash dump, and they called me back and said they would immediately
> escalate to "Level 2".  A week later "Level 2" wrote back to us asking
> about our serial number, because they couldn't process the complaint
> without one.
>
> By the time Netgear called us back, we'd already bought an HP ProCurve
> to replace it.  More money for the same or less features, but everything
> works, the support group actually answers questions, and comes with
> a real lifetime warranty.  It turns out Netgear's "limited lifetime
> warranty" is only for a few years - that information is nowhere to be
> had on their web site, you can only find out by opening up a support
> query.
>
> Needless to say, I don't recommend anything from Netgear.
>