Dell undercutting Cisco

[The PIT]

In Europe Brittish is taught in schools. We had conversation teacher from London (although we had 2 expatriates from USA previously).

No such thing as British dunno what lang that is.

[GT98]

Or so you think : To disguise the fact the callcentre is actually in India, they teach their staff to speak with accents by watching lots of English language movies and tv programs.

You probably got through to someone who'd been taught English during John Wayne season.

Not really...since my company supports the US Goverment we have the enterprise support with english speaking tech support, but this guy sounded extacly like he was from Texas...and I've been on the phone with a couple of them...

[Kurt]

@TP: It's a bit like Engrish, but it has a dictionary.

[RichL]

No such thing as British dunno what lang that is.

British is the regional dialect of English that we speak on these fair shores. (Sometimes also called Yookay English )

When you install MSWord, amongst other things, it asks if you'd like US English or UK English dictionaries.

[Tjalfe]

Just exactly what will go wrong with a simple switch?.. it either works 100%, or you RMA it for a new one.. no need for much support for that .. Routers are a different story

[agallag]

Just exactly what will go wrong with a simple switch?.. it either works 100%, or you RMA it for a new one.. no need for much support for that .. Routers are a different story

You've obviously never use a Nortel switch then. You'd think they'd either work, or not work, but then you'd be wrong. We had a couple of them that would randomly hang after several weeks. They were wired for redundancy (along with NIC teaming on the server) and even when one hung, the failover, er, failed. Top notch switch there.

[Tjalfe]

I guess my esperiences with switches only go as far as a 16 port Linksys, which we have had running here at work for 2 years, without a hitch... then again, it does not have any fancy features at all..

[Jammrock]

Getting a high grade switch does make a difference, especially when the big loads hit. We use Gb Cisco Catalysts at work and I did tests comparing it to a generic Netgear Gb switch w/ buffer. The Cisco kicked its ass. A 9 GB data transfer went something like 5 minutes faster on the Cisco, and that was with the Netgear dedicated ONLY to the transfer and the Cisco handling an entire subnet's workload on top of my 9 GB transfer. That's why I was so shocked to see the Dell so cheap ... assuming that it has similar abilities as the Cisco brethren (catalysts start at what ... $1200...$1500 ... and that's without the service contract).

It would be interesting to see if the Dell switch is simply a workgroup grade switch in a 1U chassis, or a real enterprise grade switch. If I had the cash I'd grab one and do a side-by-side versus a Catalyst 6000-series (we have them just lying around at work...literally), but alas, spending $250-$450 on a switch right now is not an option

Jammrock

[Tjalfe]

as far as I know, most cheaper gigabit stuff does not handle jumbo packages, would that possibly explain some of the performance difference?

[Helevitia]

as far as I know, most cheaper gigabit stuff does not handle jumbo packages, would that possibly explain some of the performance difference?

You mean Jumbo packets. But this has nothing to do with it since most people don't use Jumbo packets and typically lower end devices don't even support it. Most tests that you see run use 64 byte packets since the smaller the packet, the bigger the overhead. The bigger the packet (1500 bytes in most cases) have less over head and therefore, the throughput will be greater. So Jumbo packets typically get better throughput anyway.

The performance difference comes down to the backplane of the device. For example, the dell switch may have 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports but the backplane may only be able to handle 8Gb/s. Now, compare that to Cisco's 24 port Gigabit switch which may be able to handle 12Gb/s. Keep in mind that I am making up numbers, I don't know the real throughput of either of the devices in question.

And last, most lower end competitor equipment is usually compared to Linksys devices since they are really not even in the same league as a real Cisco switch.

[Taz]

The performance difference comes down to the backplane of the device.

And that's the one thing they normally neglect to put on the spec sheet