It’s pretty widely known that I hate Cisco 3750 switches. We’ve had so many hardware and software failures with them that I’ve got a seriously bad taste in my mouth. Since I’m leaving for a new company, I thought I’d publish some statistics while I still have access to the numbers.

Total TAC cases online casino usa european roulette opened related to 3750s: 21 Number of 3750G-12S-S replaced: 21 Number of 3750G-24TS replaced: 7 Total number of RMAs issued: 28 Total number of 3750s in the company: ~120 Failure rate: 23.3%

Last week, @fletcherjoyce posted an article on his blog about his positive experiences with Cisco’s 3750 switches.  If you follow my complaints tweets, you know that I’ve had quite the opposite experience with them.  I would never pick on anyone, but I had to throw in my 2 cents.

I’m guessing here, but we have about 50 3750 stacks in the enterprise.  Most of them are pairs, you wind up with roughly 120 switches.  Since we’ve done about 20 replacements over the last 5 years, that means we have a 17% failure rate.  That’s pretty horrible, isn’t it?

For those that don’t know, when I say “stack”, I mean a group of 3750s connected together using the StackWise technology.  When you use a very expensive and very proprietary cable, your individual switches are combined into a single logical device.  This means you configure one device to control potentially many switches.

To the point.  I’ve spent the last few weeks replacing a mess of 3750s in stacks.  These guys are very easy to replace, but the big problem I find is getting the IOS version in sync.  When the RMA comes, it’s inevitably got a different version on it, and you’ll see something like this.