[BBLISA] Cisco versus Dell switches

[Edward Ned Harvey]

Hey everyone.  I know cisco is better; that's not the question.  The
question is - is cisco better in any of the ways I will care about.  Enough
to outweigh the extra cost.  I'm comparing 24port managed gigabit, against
24port managed gigabit.

If I buy the cisco, I am sure the switches will be stable, and remain
operational, I can safely assume they continue doing their job at all times
with pure trust.  Until the switch suffers some total failure, and I RMA the
device.  I am prepared to face the risk that cisco RMA is 4 hour, while Dell
RMA is NBD.

But in the past (2002) I had problems with Dell switches that would crash.
I was in a company that used experimental network hardware, but now it's
unclear if the cause was the switches or the experimental network hardware.
It's also unclear if there was a problem back in 2002, which is now
resolved.

Does anyone use Dell switches, can you say you're able to work without
problems in general?  You're able to put some heavy NFS traffic across the
network, and the switches don't unexplainedly crash?