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Force 10 Networks
Have any of you had any experience working with Force 10 networks solutions?? I can't find many resource out on the net aside from their website. I was at a conference last night and they had a booth set up. I was talking to one of their engineers and made mention that we are looking to purchase two Cisco 4500 series switches for one of our plants. Now, I absolutely love Cisco and HP gear, we're very heavy users of both. The one thing that really bugs me though about the Cisco switches is that there is a lot of oversubscription so the ports don't have full line rate capabilities and their backplanes don't have as much throughput as some of the other guys. With that being said, the characteristics of our data and the sheer volume of our data won't suffer too badly if at all by the shortcomings listed. The Force 10 products have incredible numbers in line rate capacity, backplane, and throughput and they are a fraction of the cost. The downside is that they have roughly 1% of the market and there aren't too many people that I can find who have experience with them to get their feedback. I suppose I could get some customer references, but I'm not sure if there are many other organizations in the same industry as mine which is renewable fuels. Thanks for your time.
Preparing for CCIE Written