This is a very brief opinionated review about the DES-1210-28P. My opinion has no value and is generally not suitable for anyone. So, don't listen to me. Ever. About anything. There, that's my disclaimer.
The reviewer, me, is a Cisco CCNP, experienced with Juniper, unix sysadmin, carrier class routers/switches, etc.
My goal in buying this switch was to find the cheapest per-post cost/value switch with the following requirements;
- Must be rack mountable.
- Must have 24-28 ports.
- Must provide standards based 802.3af PoE on all ports.
- Must have a reasonable PoE budget to power all of the ports.
- I was looking for Voice VLAN support via LLDP-MED.
- Must be CHEAP.
So I bought this switch and also a Cisco/Linksys SF 300-24P (SRW series).
If manageability is important to you, the Linksys blows the DLink away. The DLink's telnet line support is very basic (firmware update and IP address config only), no ssh, no TACACS+/RADIUS authentication support, not even a username for management, no serial port, limited configuration options, config is backed up as a binary blob, so not editable. Finally, to top it all off, the Cisco SF 300 series will soon be getting a Cisco-IOS-like CLI (per Cisco employee comments online), which will make it super-awesome if it's like the LCLI that the SRW series had before Cisco removed it.
The one good thing about the DLink management is it's SNMP support. Except for that whole little resetting config and reloading but that I posted about previously... I walked the switch and it looks like there are enough OIDs for good monitoring. I can't speak to if those OIDs actually work though.
The DLink was only $330, which is an awesome deal for a PoE switch with 24 ports. If you need super-cheap PoE ports and don't care about management, VLANs, QoS, Voice VLANs, or that junk, this thing is pretty good.
The Cisco/Linksys SF 300-24P was about $150 more where I bought it. If you need management features, it's very much worth the extra money. That said, VLAN and trunking management on the Cisco/Linksys is very confusing due to the goofy web interface.
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Topic: Quick opinion review on the DES-1210-28P (Read 12952 times)