Dell PowerConnect were a series of managed and unmanaged ethernet switches for data centers, discontinued by Dell. They have been superseded by the PowerSwitch line of switches, from Dell.
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Huawei Ethernet Switches
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Global company Huawei IT, headquartered in Guangdong, China, offers Ethernet switches.
We work in the electric industry. These should not be used in a high-heat environment. We like to keep the temperature of the room in the low 60's so they are not suited for our Substation locations due to extreme heat and cold. However, they perform great in a server room.
Huawei Ethernet Switches are perfect no-nonsense network switches that can be used in any internal network. They are especially helpful if you require PoE functionalities or if you need to configure network settings manually (e.g. static routing, VLAN). There are no real-life situations I can think of where these switches would not be suitable
I've had fans burn out after the warranty period. In a way that is a positive and tells you just how long the fans last. However, it would be nice if the fans lasted a bit longer.
In a perfect world, it would be nice if the switches were not so loud.
The Dell PowerConnect switch is a great switch in certain use cases. It really works well when training users to set up their own vlans in a technology class. We have a lot of different scenarios happening at this company, with 8 different buildings and multiple different affiliate entities. For some of the departments, the budget is the most crucial element. That is where the Dell PowerConnect switches are a really great option.
The switches perform very well in our core backbone and also in metro Ethernet networks. We are able to provide high service availability and greater resilience for our customers. The switches also provide high performance in several data centers where we have a presence focused on IX exchange. They are also very useful as CPEs.
Dell ProSupport is outstanding. Dell ProDeploy is likewise outstanding. I prefer them even over traditional Cisco support. I've had repeated cases where Dell immediately addressed or fixed an issue with US-based support, including firmware hotfixes. Not even Cisco can boast that.
I selected Dell mainly due to previous experience using them in a business environment. I've never had a unit fail on me and when my budget for equipment like network switches has been less than a training class on how to use those switches, it's incredible to be able to find quality equipment at the price point Dell offers and even more so when their enterprise support has been as excellent as I have been accustomed to dealing with. In all honesty, even if I had a larger budget, I would have bought these same switches since they were exactly what I needed to suit my needs. We looked into HPE/Aruba network switches, and while they would have performed everything we needed and more, they were almost four times the cost of these Dell network switches. That's a hard sell when it comes to planning a tight budget.
The performance of Huawei is lower than Cisco, but initially the costs inclined the decision towards Huawei, but unfortunately, it was not, the licenses and the manager fired the investment to make it very similar to cisco. Therefore it is preferable to go to the Cisco switches for reliability and robustness.
