On 2/24/2012 9:17 PM, Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 05:59:41PM -0500, Will Dennis wrote:
Careful... The "regular" Dell PowerConnect switches (35xx, 55xx, 80xx
etc.) != Dell Force10. The PowerConnect line is made of "merchant
silicon" (Broadcomm, SuperMicro reference, etc.) and is nowhere near the
performance or reliability of the Force10 line. Of course, it doesn't
cost Force10 money either... The cheapest Force10 switch I see on the
Dell site we use (Dell Premier) is $4,116 for a Force10 S25N
(24x10/100/1000 copper, 4xSFP.) We do use the PowerConnect line in some
non-critical applications (mostly research clusters.) The are fine for
the price.
That's funny; on ebay, the force10 stuff is about the cheapest you can
go. you can get 24 port 10G (!) force10 switches on ebay for $2200
(4x XFP ports and 20 cx4 ports) I have not ordered any of these,
though I'm considering it.
I also have 2x SA-01-GE48T switches that I got for $300 on ebay.
Another $400 and you can put in 2 10G capable xfp ports in back (I
think; I have not tried.)
On the other hand, the force10 documentation is behind a paywall.
If you call force10 and ask to pay for firmware updates or even just
access to the documentation and tell them it is a used switch, they
act like you told them you stole it. Mine are not in production yet,
in part because I am uncomfortable with the fact that I don't have
firmware, but mostly because I don't have the documentation.
I'm interested to hear that force10 is considered good, when they
appear to be the cheapest available used switches of their speed on
ebay. I wonder if the price reflects the difficulty of obtaining
documentation.
I do need to upgrade my switching systems to 10G; I'm currently
waffling between this force10 gear and HP Procurve chassis switches, for
which I can get firmware and documentation, but for which I have to
pay rather more. (In my price range, it's used either way.)
the S2410 switch (20@cx4 and 4@XFP) is fair. The problem is that it's a
fairly old OS, sftos, and almost all the modern things you want to
connect to it will not do CX4, so that's of limited use. We also have
had issues with the management capability randomly going away on these,
even serial console. That's probably part of the reason they are so
inexpensive. Also, they have no L3 capability, they are purely L2 and
because it's SFTOS the configuration syntax will be a bit foreign. the
4810 switch is SO MUCH BETTER and with FTOS is looks very similar to IOS.
On the other hand, the 2410 will forward your packets on the backplane
very quickly. It's plenty fast enough.
I'd very much recommend the 4810. It's an awesome switch. It also has 4
@40g ports that you can use to stack them together to make virtual
chassis and have LAG to hosts.
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