Well... I'm biased to Cisco, but I do believe some of the Extreme Networks and Foundry (maybe even HP) boxes beat Cisco's high end "core" switches hands down. That being said, I believe this was based purely on L2 switching speed/capacity. Sounds like you need a box that not only switches at L2 quickly, but also routes/switches L3 traffic quickly as well. Just keep that in mind when comparing switches of this nature - a lot of manufacturers will say that they switch faster than Cisco's offering.... what they don't tell you is that this is pure L2 traffic only. No filtering, no Inter-VLAN routing, no Shaping/QoS, etc. When you couple in all of those advanced features, I think you'll find that a lot of vendors are equally powerful in their own right. The trick is finding the best mix of "power" for your environment and sticking with a good vendor. The rest is personal preference :-)
BTW - have you considered Cisco's 3750E line? A couple 48 port 3750s stacked to each other can compete with many of their higher end cousins. HTH, Aaron Rohyans IT Coordinator, IDC-USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 317.244.8307 (V) 317.244.4600 (F) ________________________________ From: Chinnery, Paul [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 1:10 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Network core switch My old Cisco 4006 is nearing end of life where Cisco won't even support it. So, I need to put it in a budget request for a replacement core switch. I've already researched possible Cisco replacements but I wanted to ask the group for their opinions regarding other company's products such as Foundry. 95% of all network traffic passes through this switch which is a layer 3, btw. 48 gig ports, 6 or so gbics and the balance will be 100 meg. Paul Chinnery Network Administrator Memorial Medical Center 231-845-2319 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
