[c-nsp] Switch/router recommendations?

[Ed Ravin]

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.