It's with this mind-set that I unboxed the new Dell PowerConnect 6248, the next generation of the top-end, PowerConnect 6024, which offers Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as Layer-3 core switching functions. The 6248 differs from the 6028 in many ways -- the least of which is a full complement of 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The 6028 was Dell's first L3 switch, and it came in two flavors, a 24-port copper or 24-port SFP fiber model, each having four dual-personality copper/fiber ports. At the back of the 6024 were two standard power supplies.

The 6248 boasts the same four dual-personality ports up front, but it lacks the second power supply in back. The likely reason for the single power supply: The 6248 has two module slots in the rear. These slots can house either a 48Gbps stacking module, or a 10-Gig module containing two 10-Gig ports.

Thus, a fully loaded 6248 can drive a total of four 10-Gig ports in addition to the 48 gigabit ports up front. Stock, the price is US$2,649. With a single 10-Gig module and two XFP LR optics, it climbs to $5,546. By contrast, a Cisco 4948 10-Gig switch with the same configuration costs more than $15,000 -- and the 6248 can add two more 10-Gig ports than the 4948 can.

So what's the catch? Performance on the front 48 gigabit ports is wire-rate, and, according to Dell, the 10-Gig performance is also wire-rate. Although my lab wasn't equipped to do a full 10GbE test, my Neterion 10-Gig LR cards could only push about 3Gb through the 6248. This is likely due to the fact that the 10-Gig cards aren't in 266MHz PCI-E slots, although Dell has acknowledged rate issues with 10G NICs. Some tweaking of interface parameters helped here, but the switch still didn't hit true 10-Gig performance.