Cisco Switches?

Energize · 4 Feb 2006 at 19:58

Do cisco make small gigabit switches? Because they all seem to have like 20 ports on them. Their website is poorly structered so I didnt want to look hours for one there.

tolien · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:04

Cisco Catalyst Express 500G-12TC Switch - "Eight 10/100/1000BASE-T and four 10/100/1000BASE-T or SFP ports for switch aggregation or server connectivity."

No details in the Cisco site (that I can see) though.

Edit: Looking around, that switch retails for...£939.99 inc VAT :eek:

Burbleflop · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:08

The only 'small' one I can think of the Catalyst Express 500G-12TC which has 12 x 10/100/1000 ports (4 of which can be turned off if GBIC's are added)

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6545/products_data_sheet0900aecd80322aeb.html

Ricochet J · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:24

tolien said:
Edit: Looking around, that switch retails for...£939.99 inc VAT

Bwuh ha ha ha ha! And the worrying thing is companies buy them.
AND CISCO LIKE IT! :eek:

Energize · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:28

Why do companies buy cisco things? If they cost that much then they are a rip off, im suprised their even allowed to sell things for that much.

Burbleflop · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:30

Energize said:
Why do companies buy cisco things? If they cost that much then they are a rip off, im suprised their even allowed to sell things for that much.

Companies buy Cisco because it's the best you can get. The kit is reliable, upgradable, and feature packed. I wouldn't consider anything other than Cisco for the company.

Companies can set what ever pricing structure they like. You get what you pay for afterall.

tolien · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:33

eXSBass said:
Bwuh ha ha ha ha! And the worrying thing is companies buy them.

From the lack of information (and price - double the price of a Cat2950, albeit with no GigE and less GBICs, but double the ports), I'd have thought damned few bought them over the bigger Catalysts.

AND CISCO LIKE IT!

Yup, a company likes people giving them money. Abnormal isn't it :confused:

Energize · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:53

burbleflop said:
Companies buy Cisco because it's the best you can get. The kit is reliable, upgradable, and feature packed. I wouldn't consider anything other than Cisco for the company.

Companies can set what ever pricing structure they like. You get what you pay for afterall.

I know that its the best but is it worth buying a 8 port cisco router for £900, when you can get ones that work just as well and reliably for £20, surely companies wouldnt want to spend so much money when they can spend hundreds less on something that is almost the same?

Beansprout · 4 Feb 2006 at 20:58

Energize said:
I know that its the best but is it worth buying a 8 port cisco router for £900, when you can get ones that work just as well and reliably for £20, surely companies wouldnt want to spend so much money when they can spend hundreds less on something that is almost the same?

"just as well and reliably" - sure?

Methinks you're a bit out of your depth re the corporate environment

Burbleflop · 4 Feb 2006 at 21:02

Energize said:
I know that its the best but is it worth buying a 8 port cisco router for £900, when you can get ones that work just as well and reliably for £20, surely companies wouldnt want to spend so much money when they can spend hundreds less on something that is almost the same?

We're talking about a switch, not a router here, but anyway... If companies didn't want to spend the money on Cisco kit, then they wouldn't and Cisco would go bust. Cisco are going from strength to strength so I think that shows companies are prepared to pay for it.

Put it this way, I spent £10k on a pair of routers for one of my offices. I could have (in theory) spent £50 on a router but that router wouldn't have the functionality (I'm yet to find a SoHo router that'll do EIGRP, OSPF and so on) that I need it to and I would much rather pay for a quality product now than have to deal with the consequences when the cheapo unit dies leaving an office down.

Energize · 4 Feb 2006 at 21:07

Beansprout said:
"just as well and reliably" - sure?

Methinks you're a bit out of your depth re the corporate environment

Well Ive been using a £5 generic 8 port switch for 2 years and its never crashed once, so a £20 netgear one should be even better, I just dont see how something can be more reliable than that. If its a 8 port switch its only going to be a very small shop/office using it anyway so I dont see why they would pay £900 for one.

Burbleflop · 4 Feb 2006 at 21:10

Might wanna remove that competitor.

You can't make a direct comparison like that, you're comparing a dumb switch to a layer 3 managed switch - they're different beasts.

zetec452 · 4 Feb 2006 at 23:27

Energize said:
Well Ive been using a £5 generic 8 port switch for 2 years and its never crashed once, so a £20 netgear one should be even better, I just dont see how something can be more reliable than that. If its a 8 port switch its only going to be a very small shop/office using it anyway so I dont see why they would pay £900 for one.

What do you use your £5 generic 8 port switch for? Perhaps a very busy business network in a location about 4 hours drive away? Didn't think so.

pdw8 · 5 Feb 2006 at 00:31

Cisco is definatley the number 1 choice at the high end of the market for swtiching and LAN purposes but not for WAN uses. Juniper is the choice of many carriers and ISP's but they are super expensive.
In the carrier/ISP world you need to be using Cisco etc to get the features you need to provide services to customers.
However, in a data centre or server farm environment I can;t see why you can't you 3com switches etc for simple LAN switching.

I am currently building a new ethernet backbone (multiple 10GE's) between Washington, New York, London, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. If we used Juniper kit it would cost about $12M US but we are using a newish supplier (who I can't name) and the kit is costing about $4m meaning we get more revenue against CAPEX to try to pay off the $4.5B the company owes.

Sorry, a bit off topic there.

sja360 · 5 Feb 2006 at 00:53

also that cisco switch im guessing will have some extra features and will be properly managed? as even if the components are ultra reliable i'd have thought there still requires to be more features to make the cost worthwhile.

Caged · 5 Feb 2006 at 02:16

pdw8 said:
newish supplier

Not Foundry is it?

pdw8 · 5 Feb 2006 at 17:56

Caged said:
Not Foundry is it?

No. It's a new company not many (including myself before) had heard off. The kit seems very stable so far ans it's already been implemented in our US network.

Caged · 5 Feb 2006 at 23:25

No doubt we'll hear about them in a while then

Skilldibop · 7 Feb 2006 at 14:50

Companies use cisco because they are the most refined and well balanced on the market. The IOS is standardised so everyone knows how to use it.
They never break/stop. I've seen 2600s with uptime well in excess of 1000 days.
Where other companies produce the odd outstanding product, Cisco have entire series' that are tried and tested to be absolutely bullet proof.
The biggest selling point is the scalability of their products.
They also developed things like RIP and RIPv2 which are cisco propriatory dynamic routing protocols which can be used in addition to industry standards.
They just go one better than anyone else and so if it's mission critical it'll be Cisco.

pdw8 · 7 Feb 2006 at 22:21

Skilldibop said:
Companies use cisco because they are the most refined and well balanced on the market. The IOS is standardised so everyone knows how to use it.
They never break/stop. I've seen 2600s with uptime well in excess of 1000 days.
Where other companies produce the odd outstanding product, Cisco have entire series' that are tried and tested to be absolutely bullet proof.
The biggest selling point is the scalability of their products.
They also developed things like RIP and RIPv2 which are cisco propriatory dynamic routing protocols which can be used in addition to industry standards.
They just go one better than anyone else and so if it's mission critical it'll be Cisco.

I don't agree with some of that statement. I deploy Cisco kit all the time and have always got at least one TAC case open for an RMA at any one time. It is not bulletproof by any means.The same can be said for Juniper aswell, and that costs more than Cisco on average.
There are a few new companies that are coming into the scene such as Huawei from China who recently won a big chunk of the BT 21CN deal.