amfony Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 Hi Guys, Just a curiosity itch I've never had scratched. What is up with 3com? All over this forum i read about primarily ProCurve gear, and if not that then Cisco. Is 3com a more unreliable/expensive/ brand then others? In addition to this whilst recently trying to source a 3com piece of equipment ive heard 2wice that "sorry we dont stock 3com gear anymore". Is 3com 'falling off' in the marketplace? Insert your 2 cents here. Cheers!
SYNACK Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 I have not dealt much with 3com gear but the stuff I have used has been reliable and reasonably well speced if reasonably expencive. Personally and only from my experience I would rate as follows: Cisco hp 3com D-link (better warrenty cover from what I hear in the southern hemisphere) Netgear .. .. TP-Link
sjl Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 We use all 3com gear throughout the school and recently replaced all our existing 3COM network infrastructure with new 3COM switches. We used the 5500G with fibre expansion module which the cabs and servers connect in to, we have about 500 workstations connected with 12 servers and it alll works great. I was mainly used to Cisco gear before which was really high quality gear but you pay for it too. If we were planning on replacing the whole network with 1GB Cisco switches i would of had to mortgage my granny. I have used HP switches too and had a good experience with them and i would put 3COM easily on par with HP. They are very easy to setup an automatically stack making a cab very easy to manage with a really good web interface. Cheers, Steve.
Geoff Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 With Cisco gear you pay a lot extra for the little Cisco badge on the box. HP kit is just as good as Cisco kit, minus the price tag IMHO. 3com, well, I am in the process of replacing our old Superstack3 kit with HP Procurves.
Iain.Faulkner Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 My School is 3Com across the board as well, as mentioned earlier in the thread, we've never had any real problems. It's reliable kit, and it's costed reasonably as well (certainly significantly cheaper than HP or Cisco).
jam3s Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 Hi Guys, Just a curiosity itch I've never had scratched. What is up with 3com? All over this forum i read about primarily ProCurve gear, and if not that then Cisco. Is 3com a more unreliable/expensive/ brand then others? In addition to this whilst recently trying to source a 3com piece of equipment ive heard 2wice that "sorry we dont stock 3com gear anymore". Is 3com 'falling off' in the marketplace? Insert your 2 cents here. Cheers! I think 3com lost a lot of trust when the randomly pulled from the enterprise market however all depends on what you want to do! and also what you feel most comfortable with if your buying a cisco voip solution makes scene to buy a cisco network
MatthewL Posted May 29, 2009 Posted May 29, 2009 We use Cisco PoE switches for sites that are on our managed VoIP as BT provide these and then we use 3Com switches where for data only things like printers. We have started to phase the HP's out and swap for 3Com, not found any problems with ours so far.
funkymunky Posted May 30, 2009 Posted May 30, 2009 I'm not a fan of 3Com's CLI and we've had a high amount of their switches fail in the past. We're currently removing the last few hundred from our networks and replacing with HP to bring in to line with the rest. Not had great experiences with them to be honest although they are old models so the newer stuff may be better.
john Posted May 30, 2009 Posted May 30, 2009 Very interesting that this topic has come up as were discussing switch makes and usage on the evening of the conference and the consensus was not good to 3COM (and i got sitck for being Netgear ) but i do think they did themselves no favours when they messed around the enterprise market a while ago.
amfony Posted May 31, 2009 Author Posted May 31, 2009 when they messed around the enterprise market a while ago. What happened here mate? sorry for being daft (as u brits say) Also thanks for the input in the thread guys!
actech Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 We've been getting the D-Link DGS series switches lately. Really happy with them and in 4 years only had one GBIC fail.
Oops_my_bad Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 (and i got sitck for being Netgear ) Was that because the conference was full of HP and Cisco queens who only have experience of consumer grade Netgear equipment? 1
john Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 Must admit a lot of people do seem to not realise that Netgear stuff has got the lifetime warranty on it now, and has a lot of the top level features that it was lacking. The key to Netgear is Blue = Pro stuff white = SOHO. You want to be buying Blue stuff which is the Pro stuff Also there was more than just HP and Cisco, we seemed to have some D-Link fans 2
Guest monkeyx Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 We upgraded are aging Cisco switches to 3com about 2 years ago. Added better resilience and speed for a LOT less than other brands. Never had any issues with the 2 * layer 3 switches (with fail over) and 16 layer 2 switches. Not had one fail
Sylv3r Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 When I ripped out the ageing infrastructure here about 5 years ago we placed all the existing 3Com kit with HP Procurves. We haven't had an issue with the HP kit although we never had an issue with the 3Com stuff either, although the network was small in comparision to what it is now. 150 PC's to 850 now.
FN-GM Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 Very interesting that this topic has come up as were discussing switch makes and usage on the evening of the conference and the consensus was not good to 3COM (and i got sitck for being Netgear ) but i do think they did themselves no favours when they messed around the enterprise market a while ago. I forgot about this lol
john Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 I forgot about this lol would that have been due to alcohol intake at all
SteveMC Posted May 31, 2009 Posted May 31, 2009 Must admit a lot of people do seem to not realise that Netgear stuff has got the lifetime warranty on it now, and has a lot of the top level features that it was lacking. The key to Netgear is Blue = Pro stuff white = SOHO. You want to be buying Blue stuff which is the Pro stuff Also there was more than just HP and Cisco, we seemed to have some D-Link fans Indeed, - I reckon that for small to medium-size schools, the Netgear ProSafe kit is very competitive - once you start getting into the intricacies of multi-cast routing and other more complex setups though, spending more on the HP or Cisco kit does begin to make sense. I just wish they'd bring out an 'N' version of their wireless controller (and yes, I know it's actually Aruba kit rebranded). Stephen
bio Posted June 2, 2009 Posted June 2, 2009 We also have 3com 4400's and 5500-EI switches and we are very happy with them. Good performance and excellent quality/pricing ratio... If we had tons of $$ we would certainly buy cisco. bio..
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