Who is the best Dlink or Cisco and why?

Answer 1

Best in what? If you mean home routers, then D-Link, since Cisco does not have a home product (Linksys, while a Cisco subsidiary, is NOT a Cisco product; Its like saying a Lexus LS460 and a Toyota Corolla are the same car since they're owned by Toyota). If you're comparing D-Link enterprise grade switches to Cisco products, Cisco has superior support, performance and reliability. If you have an issue with a Cisco product, a call to Cisco will put you to a knowledgeable support engineer who will most likely be able to fix your issue on the spot. If not, the engineering staff is located in the USA, and they have a rapid response team to resolve these issues rather quckly. Mind you Cisco charges an arm and a leg for their service, but they have the biggest R&D budget of any networking company. Period. Plus, there are thousands of Cisco certified professionals who can help you out via web forums. D-Link's core engineering is done in Asia. I've heard that their firmware updates take longer to be released. Support isn't nearly as good or extensive. But its a lot cheaper, and performance isn't bad. In the end of the day, if your job is on the line and reliability is key, go with Cisco. As the saying goes, nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.

**As a prior technical support trainer for D-Link I would have to disagree with the response to enterprise products. You should only go to Manila when you are a home user. Enterprise product support should always get you to a technician in Clovis, CA or Fountain Valley, CA.

As well I think any admin would agree that prudent planning is your key defense against variables. I was always taught even in school when implementing a switch "Rule #1 Always have a 2 week burn in period" (This is where the switch is on and running with traffic flowing. However the switch is not live on the network).

My other slice of advise is, prior to doing anything! Once you have that bad boy out of the box go to Dlink's support site and get the latest Boot Loader and Firmware. Then upgrade that bad boy to the latest versions. If you do your burn in period with no traffic expect about 2-3 switch restarts due to lock-ups over the course of the 2 weeks once live, other wise these will happen during your burn in phase if your are sending traffic threw them. After that they should run until the day you day. Also since Dlink has a lifetime warranty (and trust me they honor it!) I would purchase 1 additional backup unit per model series on your network. That way if something ever goes down you can swap out the switch, RMA the old one and put the RMA unit into surplus when returned to you. (this should be easy to get threw finance since you will be saving them an arm and a leg on overall HW cost and power consumption.)