For less sophisticated campus setups switches may be commodities, but it is not wise business practices to consider all switches equal, let alone commodity items.
That said this seems like a small enough deployment, so it made sense to swap them all out for a vendor hungry to sell their gear at what must have been cut rate prices (as well as get this great reference case!)
ConSentry seems to be making headway into the (rapidly leveling off) NAC market. Are non-educational, mid-large enterprises really ready to swap out all their switches just to get switch-based NAC? Probably not. In general, NAC is an idea slowly dying on the vine, whether switch-based or appliance-based. Even Cisco's relented to market pressures and moved away a long time ago from purely switch-based NAC implementations.
Interesting story nonetheless. BTW, the next to last paragraph has "Fayetteville" spelled incorrectly.
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