So as the title mentions, I am curious to know what others think of the Dell Switching Platform. Specifically, the Dell N series and Dell S series. A quick look on Reddit has revealed the consensus to be run away as quick as possible, although to be fair, some of these posts were a few years back and touch on the PowerConnect line which was considered an absolute disaster.
The reason I’m even having to consider Dell is we are coming up on our network refresh and management asked me to take call with Dell after they discovered we were in the market for a new core switching solution. We are looking to replace our Cisco Catalyst 6509-E as it is EOL and getting replacement parts may become difficult in the future. The core switch has two 48-port 1Gb SFP fiber modules and two 48-port 1Gb copper ethernet modules with only one supervisor in the chassis.
I originally looked at replacing the 6509-E with the Cisco Catalyst 9606R as a drop-in replacement and got some push back due to the cost. They aren’t completely against the idea but we will have to wait a bit longer for funding if we take this route. I also considered stacking some Catalyst 9500s or 9400s as an alternative if we went with Cisco. Being honest, these switches are probably a bit overkill.
Just a quick rundown of network.
· Cisco shop with three tier hierarchical design.
· Routing is single area OSPF with a few hundred IPv4 internal routes.
· Not many users, more of a data center.
· Bulk of data is multicast video coming back to the core in DC to be processed by internal servers.
· The catalyst 6509-E port density and throughput is substantial but looking towards the future, 10Gb ports minimum.
Not opposed to other vendors as we now have to consider Dell. Any insight or alternative recommendations would be appreciated. I also plan to take a look at Juniper and Arista.
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