One critical drawback that I have found in researching managed-switches, and one that I have some past experience with is that anything with "lots" of firmware is going to have lots of issues associated with that firmware.
We are in the middle of researching rackmount gigabit switches (48 port). It looks like for 48 ports, our only choice is managed switches (Dell, Cisco/Linksys,HP, etc). What I want to know, that I can not find out much about is the boot-time for various managed switches.
If you own one, can you please answer with the model number, and the cold boot time in seconds. I have read online that Linksys (now Cisco) SRW series sometimes take almost 5 minutes before they are fully booted up, and that is an unacceptable cost for us.
I particularly want to know about Dell PowerConnect managed switch bootup time (model 3548 and 5448), and would like to confirm the 5-minute boot time on the SRW2048 or similar model, and any HP ProCurve boot up times.
The composite of all those figures ought to form an interesting overall performance picture.