I need feedback from Tech:Angel or someone in large corps

[Bliss]

Hi room.

I need help/feedback from Tech.angel or someone else who works or has worked recently on a large corporation with LOTS of equipment or equipment change.

I am FED up and tired of having troubles with our switches (we're a small foundation, 5 floor building, 76 machines, 6 wireless APs), and our wireless APs. And every time you ask someone for a good brand, people with small networks or home experience come back with "Oh, my XXX has worked well for me"... not good enough, this year I want this network PRISTINE, I'm changing topology and rewiring parts, I am FED UP with network troubles out of fickle hardware... one new d-link 24 port rack switch bought started acting up days after purchase, and signals seem to be ok on the cables, so we're not talking overload or something..... just crappy hardware...

So I want advice on switches and Acess Points that have proven, repeatedly, to have a low incidence of DOA and short-time failure....

I know I'm asking too much, but if it's possible, keep off the VERY high end stuff like the high lines of Catalists (cisco) and such, as the budget for 2009 is pretty stiff.....

Thanks for any help

Btw about Acess Points, I've changed all the normally fickle ones for decently stable ones so far, but I have two special cases, several APs are open for the free public use, of those, two floors live inside a large cloud ofr nearby APs and client machines, and in these areas LOTS of messages are received, sometimes even what looks like wireless DoS attacks (floods of requests from unconnected machines, as evidenced on my laptop in the areas via kismet)... so these are high stress areas, the old Linksys (sysworks based WRT54Gs) used to hang up daily from it, right now I have two Zyxel W-330P in there (Linux based but no user accessability to the linux inside), they don't inhibit themselves, and help identify the DoS attacks, but still every about 5 to 7 minutes or so, they have little connection hiccups that last about 20 seconds, and they come back up... I am not looking for five nines, but I'd like to eliminate those hiccups.. :/

[Bandit]

I can only think of 4 names:

Nortel/Bay, Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade (formerly Foundry).


IMHO, the best bang for the buck is Nortel/Bay or Juniper. Nortel has a history of making stuff that lasts forever (think telecom), and the bang for the buck is a lot better than Cisco.

Juniper is a close second as they have done a lot of their own work and acquired a lot of talent and good companies along the line.

Just my two cents. And stay the hell away from anything that you can pick up at the local big-box store.

ETA: The smallest company I have worked for had an annual revenue of $200 mil/year, so I've worked for some big ones over the years.

B

[SteeleDragon78]

i have to agree with bandit on the nortels. having worked with many large companies, (ups, att, airline) most of our equipment was either nortel, cisco, and a couple of proprietary ibm equipment. the last nortel box i saw a ticket on was a swap only because it had taken a direct surge from a bad ups box. they replaced the nortel box and ups with same model nortel and better ups. the cisco stuff i dont hear much about because the dept that handles those only calls us to open major change tickets. our waps are spectralinks for the most part, but those i see on a regular basis for mac filter changes. rarely have a prob with them. not sure what the initial cost was on them though.

[technical.angel]

I can get you some more info on Monday on what we use, but most of the stuff we have is the big ticket items.

And, squee of joy for having my name in a thread.... ..... .......... and it not being for something bad!

[Chromatix]

The older D-Link switches are perfectly sound. If you can find DES-1008, DES-1016 or DES-1024 switches on the second-hand market, that might be a way to stretch the budget without compromising quality on the "bulk" of the network.

They'll do 10/100 at full duplex and within a percentage point of full aggregate line speed. They can also do switch-to-switch trunking, supposedly giving cable fault tolerance and a bandwidth boost to 800Mbps on the trunks (this isn't a feature I've tested). Thus they could make a good alternative to Gigabit switches.

They were introduced about eight years ago. They still seem to be sold new - which is unusual in this field. I'm quoted about €55 for a DES-1016, albeit with a very long lead time. Good-looking examples seem to be on eBay for much less than that. For that kind of price, you might want to buy a couple of spare units rather than the luxury of a warranty.

Just avoid the ones with a D or R suffix after the model number - they are the newer, consumer-grade versions. Still good value for local extensions within a single office, but you don't want them in your core network. The DES-1008D has a plastic case like any other consumer D-Link box. The DES-1016D still seems to have a metal case, which is smaller and lighter than the original, but has smaller buffers so it won't perform as well. The DES-1016R has the bigger case but the smaller buffers.