Foundry not only responded to all four variations of our wiring-closet scenarios, it was the only vendor to give us both a chassis-based and a stackable solution for each. The stackables were the least expensive, at $399,880 for 100 Mbps at the edge, to a whopping $1,194,265 for gigabit chassis-based gear with PoE. Although this was the highest of all the chassis-based quotes, it included totally redundant equipment at the core, which accounts for the difference. In general, we found that making the jump from powered to nonpowered hubs was insignificant compared with the increase from 100 Mbps to gigabit in the closet: Even sticking with Foundry's stackables, the cost increased by more than 60 percent. This might be hard to justify with a tight budget, but it's arguably dirt cheap for a magnitude higher of bandwidth. The real question is, will C2G's desktop applications need even 100 Mbps of bandwidth over the next four to five years? For an insurance company it isn't likely, unless the company decides to start transmitting high-quality video to desktops. If that happens, it will have to add 10 Gigabit uplinks from the closet as well. If stackables are used, it may be difficult or impossible to provide this option.
Foundry's chassis-based proposal was pricey--the 100-Mbps setup cost about the same as its stackable gigabit solution. Foundry pointed out a number of advantages of the chassis design, however. First, greater redundancy: It's possible to have two management modules in a chassis along with redundant power supplies and fans. It's also possible to provide 10 Gigabit aggregation within the building and to add more desktop ports if necessary. In addition, more of the network could be aggregated on the switch backplane. There are also TCO (total cost of ownership) benefits because we could use the same chassis for every piece of the network. This simplifies training and makes swapping boxes easier and less expensive in that C2G would have fewer spares to purchase and track. While this all appeals to our network manager side, we're not sure the ROI could be justified for such a high price.
We liked that Foundry's management application uses a Sybase database, making the data easier to extract if necessary. We were also intrigued by Foundry's support, in its equipment as well as in its network-management software, of the new sFlow standard, (RFC 3176, which provides for network-traffic monitoring and accountability technology in switches and routers; see www.inmon.com/PDF/sFlowOverview.pdf and www.sflow.org/rfc3176.txt for more details). This could give us a way to leverage applications from other vendors that could provide troubleshooting and reporting information on individual high-speed interfaces otherwise difficult to gather. All the management applications were accessible from the Web and didn't require client installs. Enterasys was the only vendor besides Foundry to propose solid, standards-based solutions for all four of our scenarios. It was edged out by Foundry because some of Enterasys' proposed products were not planned for release until April 2. Also, its 10 Gigabit card has not shipped yet, though it's scheduled to hit the streets by the time this goes to print. You could argue that this will become less of an issue over time, but you could also argue that such delays are indicative of a vendor's track record for adopting new technology. The 10 Gigabit standard was approved last June, and it was solid enough to develop standards-based products even before then.
Overall, however, Enterasys appeared ready to meet all our needs while adhering to standards, a major factor. The quality of its response set a high bar for the other vendors--the company provided thorough answers for all our questions, and its proposal showed a level of clarity and detail that far surpassed the competition.
We were also impressed by the details Enterasys revealed about its internal tech support. It was clear to us that, at least on paper, the tech support processes are efficient and well-thought-out. Of course, that doesn't guarantee they work, but it would certainly give us some good questions for the other vendors were we to investigate tech support further. We would also, of course, talk to customers of all the candidates about the effectiveness of their tech support.
