[217] in Resnet-Forum
Re: Asante experiences
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David B. Leonard)
Fri Mar 25 12:36:44 1994
From: dbl@cc.gatech.edu (David B. Leonard)
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 12:09:33 -0500 (EST)
> Roy,
>
> Check out Allied Telesis, who has good prices/features. A 12 port
> modular 10Base-T hub with SNMP, additional telnet-able management, low
> rack real estate and an AUI up-port is $650. Only $54/port. They have
> other up-port and interface options. I'm not a saleperson, just someone
> who has done some recent evaluations, I didn't even "do lunch" with
> them. A.T. has being very helpful in representing their products unlike
> some of the bigger companies who seem to have become too big for their
> britches.
> We at CMU got burnt in dealing with bad rev. interface cards from
> Asanti. Their tech support had bad followup, did not return calls, etc.
> This is sort of like buying a car, everything seems smooth at the
> showroom with hidden surprises in the service department.
>
> Pete Bronder
Well, our experience with Asante was quite different. Our first purchase of
about $12K of Asante 1012 hubs ran into what appeared initially to be a serious
problem communicating with some of our existing (and quite old) Ethernet gear.
From the initial call through all the escalations into higher levels of their
Tech Support group, we always received prompt and knowledgeable response. Even
though we were unable to conclusively prove that it was an Asante problem, we
provided a well-reasoned "smoking gun" and they took the attitude that helping
us resolve the problem could provide information that would help them in other
large installations with an existing base of older equipment. Local and
regional reps, and Clint Bogard, the Higher-Ed rep, became involved in making
sure that we were getting appropriate response. Working with Tech Support by
phone, we were eventually escalated to the Engineering group. In the final
round, one of the designers of the equipment came on-site to work with our
folks, armed with sniffer, oscilloscope, and other gear.
I won't bore you with the details of the process of tracking the problem, but
it's clear that in our experience, Asante went out of their way to help us
resolve problems. Dealing with our situation clearly cost Asante more than the
total value of our initial investment with them. In our experience, we haven't
gotten that kind of response from very many vendors, so it was quite refreshing
and certainly makes us feel comfortable with our continuing investment in
Asante equipment. Plus we got to see first-hand that they have some very sharp
people in their Tech Support and Engineering groups.
[Note: Briefly, for the curious, the problem turned out to be caused by a very
old TCL vampire-tap transceiver on a Thick Ethernet backbone segment, which
when connected to an old Wellfleet router created out of spec dribble bit
behavior. The chip set (AT&T, if I remember correctly) used in the 1012 hubs
is more exacting than some, and treated all packets from that interface as
errors. Replacing the TCL transceiver with a new one from Cabletron took care
of everything, and the TCL transceiver has a new home in the testing labs back
at Asante.]
-David
===============================================================================
David B. Leonard (dbl@cc.gatech.edu) Georgia Institute of Technology
Director, Computing and Networking Services Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
College of Computing (404) 894-9213
