After trying Dell switches, we will be looking to explore other options.

I evaluated Cisco, HP, and Arista products.

In comparison, Dell PowerConnect Switches provide normal switching or just the basic switching and routing protocols required for DC or campus area network infrastructure, while Cisco and HP have industry-standard and advanced protocols such as EVPN, IRS, clustering, VPC, virtual channels, etc., which are missing in Dell PowerConnect Switches. Even Arista has a good switching infrastructure for data centers.

Dell PowerConnect Switches is quite simple to operate, but if you compare it with Cisco, Arista, or HP, the switching infrastructure of Dell is inferior, and the main challenge is that it's missing industry-standard or advanced switching protocols.

The reason many people still buy Dell PowerConnect Switches, particularly the big organizations, is because of the Dell infrastructure. For example, if you buy the Dell rack solution "VxRail", then you have NSX and a complete Dell suite with storage, you'll want to have  Dell PowerConnect Switches, so mostly, the switches from Dell work perfectly because they're part of a bundle of Dell products.

I evaluated Cisco, Meraki, Ruckus, and SonicWall.

We evaluated Cisco, HP, Aruba, and Brocade. In most cases, the clients decide based on the brand and the price.

We evaluated numerous options before choosing Dell including Fortinet, HP and Cisco. But really it was this solution that worked given our budget and for installation, it was a good solution in terms of technical support, scalability, availability and a lot of things. It satisfied our requirements.

Not really, as we moved from Fibre Channel to iSCSI with an EqualLogic PS4100, and we got the switches, servers and SAN box in one package.