It's incredible to me that you gave the top spot to Cisco when it was TWO TIMES the price of the nearest competitor! As a matter of fact you only mention it in passing, as if it is totally irrelevant. It does not appear in the "Cons" column for the Cisco! The overall scores among the top players were so close, an unbiased reviewer would have come out and said, "You should be fired if you waste your company's money on the Cisco switch". Period.
Imagine an automotive magazine's shootout between a Ford, Chevy and Chrysler; where the reviewer finds that the cars are basically identical. The Ford wins by a hair but costs TWICE the price of the other cars. Can you imagine a single LEGIT automotive magazine that wouldn't totally trash the Ford for their pricing and highly recommend that the consumer avoid it?
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RE: Cisco hater
Get over it, this was a performance test. I didn't see anything to indicate cost. Bottom line is that you get what you pay for. Based on past experience with many of these product lines I could never recommend Dell, HP, Alcatel and many of the others due to hardware stability issues. If you want to buy the cheapest switch (with horrible support) then go right ahead, it's your money. If you take a look at the number of features supported Cisco wins everytime, but that isn't to say that you need half of those features. Extreme and Foundry make very nice switches, but they don't always have everything you need 100% of the time.
Basically you need to get over the fact that Cisco makes a decent product despite the high prices that they charge. BTW your analogy is completely horrible!
RE: Cisco hater
Hello, I'm the author of this test.
I didn't use price as a test criterion for this project because Network World asked me not to. Two issues went into that decision:
1. List prices are squishy. Especially for medium and large sized enterprises, list prices are often heavily discounted; prices vary HUGELY country to country (which is a scandal on its own, but vendor country pricing wasn't the device under test here); and one nominal reason for publications doing testing at all is to show you things you can't find out yourself -- such as scalability, security, and manageability of many switches all in one place. Your sales rep will still be happy to quote you a price.
2. There's a process issue. We told vendors price would not be a test criterion prior to them deciding to participate, and prior to them deciding which switch to send. I don't believe it could reasonably be called fair to ding a product on price if we'd told the particpating vendor we wouldn't be comparing on price.
Of course price is a consideration for many (though not all) enterprises buying switches. We've used it as a test criterion in previous tests, and will do again in future tests (including an upcoming one on enterprise 802.11n solutions).
Regards,
David Newman
Price
You say: "Of course price is a consideration for many (though not all) enterprises buying switches."
The reality is that price IS a consideration for ALL. However, in this case the IT manager has almost total influence over the vendor purchase decision since the bean counters are not technically proficient enough to challenge what he recommends. Cisco charges so much for their switches because MOST IT managers (and I know I will get in trouble for saying that in this magazine!) do not have the wisdom or the courage to pick another vendor. Everyone is locked into buying Cisco, because that is all they know and that is their comfort zone. Unfortunately, that does a disservice to the company, as the IT manager pays DOUBLE for his data infrastructure. Most just laugh and say the company doesn't care. Name me one company that doesn't care about wasting money. Name me one shareholder that doesn't care.
Price.....
You guys are all freaking out about what something costs to BUY, not what it COSTS to OWN!! If my IT infrastructure environment consists of 7 manufacturers hardware....how much time and effort does it take to support this over a single vendor environment over the life of those solutions? What kind of features do I get that I can ONLY get from a single vendor environment that a multi-vendor environment cant provide? What kind of discounts can I get on procuring hardware from a single manufacturer over buying from 4, 5, 6, 7 manufacturers?
I think people are getting hung up on TCA (Total Cost of Aquisition) and forgetting completely about TCO ( Total Cost of Ownership) which is a more true evaluation of ANY products cost.
Another automotive analogy: I think Consumer Reports is now producing for the first time ever a TCO calculation for each car it reviews. They have determined you can buy a Ford Explorer for $3000 cheaper than a Toyota Highlander, but the Highlander will be $6,000 cheaper over the life to own when, repairs, depreciation, downtime, etc are factored in.
Just food for thought.
Even if I'm willing to
Even if I'm willing to accept your reasoning for not including price as a point for comparison (and I don't accept that, it just smells terrible considering you've got Cisco ads plastered everywhere and a blog called "Cisco Subnet") how can you say that this was a performance test???? Cisco is well known as a blocking switch. Look at it's fully loaded performance.... fill all the ports and put 80% capacity on those ports and tell me what happens. Then do that same test on the Force10 or the Foundry. This especially inflates the price of the Cisco device even further because you can't use all of the switch you bought! If you think this isn't a real scenario, stop by our data center and see 6509's, and a few 6513's dropping packets like its their job. Let's also not forget that Cisco has finally rolled out an architechture that other vendors have had for years in their Nexsus-7000 and claimed it as new.
If you have the performance
If you have the performance problems you are saying you do (I doubt you actually do) then you have some serious engineer issues.
The example test you have given is exactly why people choose cisco over the other vendors (except you have it backwards which is just freaking hilarious) When you fill a Cisco switch, you will get the performance you pay for. Vendors like HP and others many times won't put their switched pps and real world throughput.
The performance difference I have seen in cases I've proofed personally between the cisco devices and others sells it for me and for my customers. I can't afford to make a decision to buy a crap switch because when my customer has problems, I lose business.
You my friend, are an idiot.
Even if I'm willing to
"fill all the ports and put 80% capacity on those ports and tell me what happens. "
Jeez, did you even read the article or methodology?
In the unicast performance tests, that's *exactly* what we did -- offered traffic at up to line rate to all ports (48 gig ports in a fully meshed pattern, 2 10-gig ports in a port-pair pattern, all simultaneously) to determine each switch's throughput rate. We did this with three separate tests for 64-, 256-, and 1518-byte frames.
For all switches except D-Link's DGS-3650, throughput was at or near line rate. In the case of the Catalyst 3750, the highest no-drop rate we observed was 99.5 percent of line rate. So, at least from these results (and others I've conducted of several of these same switches in private tests), your assertion about blocking at loads above 80% of line rate is way off base.
Cisco argued that our 99.5% result was actually attributable to clock slop between the Spirent TestCenter interfaces and its switch, and said it had gone higher, something like 99.975% of line rate, in internal tests.
I neither agree nor disagree with their testing, but I don't necessarily agree that loss due to clock slop is acceptable.
This has come up before, and there are a couple of points to bear in mind. First, the crystals on precision test instruments such as Spirent TestCenter oscillate far less than ordinary Ethernet interfaces around nominal line rate. Second, neither Cisco nor any other vendor gets to decide what rate its customers' equipment operates at.
The IEEE 802.3 specification is pretty clear about this: An Ethernet interface *must* tolerate clock slop of +/- 100 parts per million. Spirent TestCenter was well within that range.
In any event, I don't consider the difference between 99.5 and 100 percent of line rate to be a huge problem in most production settings. Certainly packet loss is never a good thing, but I'm not so much of an absolutist to declare a switch is junk if it doesn't run at exactly line rate.
I would say that if the throughput rate was 80 percent of line rate, but that simply isn't the case.
Regards,
David Newman
ps. Who are you, "anonymous," and are you affiliated with any vendor?
Switching not necessarily a commodity - but
I saw the comments and certainly, price does matter. The fair way of doing such tests would be to ask for products in a certain price band, this way you are comparing apples to apples.
Still it is fair to provide credits for meaningful features. So it would be great to work out a reasonably relevant mock RFP and ask for a bid - then ask for the vendors to provide the box that meets the needs and is priced reasonably within the scope of the test. If the products meet the requirements they can play. It is also fair to provide reasonable sophisticated features as peoples requirements for VLANs security features, inter VLAN layer 3 switching, high availability and management features.
What is not fair is to compare two products that do not target the same customers. Cisco could command a 20% premium - in the actual bid price, based on the fact they are Cisco - still nobody gets a promotion for the visionary direction of choosing Cisco. However they do make good products, but they have lost some of their lead in the last few years - to many versions - to many OS´s - to little focus.
ethernet access switch shootout
according to Gartner 3com is number 2 in ports shipped. why were they not included in the test?
Get a Cisco switch at the
Get a Cisco switch at the price/performance of a x450 to do say....L3 jumbo frames.....not so fast. But that would be about the switch ability to switch packets, which used to be Cisco's business.
Cisco support, who are we kidding. They used to have stellar support 10 years ago.
I personally considered the Cisco 4980 vs Extreme x450 and I just could not justify with a straight face such acquisition.
But you are right, Cisco makes decent products....decent just doesn't cut it anymore.
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