Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?

Mon Jan 10 17:04:22 UTC 2011

Wow, overall consensus is that there are quite a few that are migrating to Juniper from Cisco.

I am a bit biased because I have spent an awful amount of time invested into Cisco and understanding how to configure them.
But being a former business owner, I also am very much sensitive to costs and business needs.

For those that have been Cisco focused, do you stay fully objective, and are you willing to pitch another vendor knowing that you will
have to learn a new IOS? And that that will be your time that you'll have to spend to understand the product and support it?

We have been selling HP procurves to SMB's because of the cost factor. I don't really mind them all that much. I've tried to fit Cisco switches
in the mix but their pricing is just so much more as well as the smartnet costs. They really price themselves out and that is unfortunate.

I will be looking at refreshing our core switches and routers soon so I will stay objective as much as I can. 

=)

> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:36:24 -0600
> CC: brandon.kim at brandontek.com
> From: tad1214 at gmail.com
> 
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:31:32 -0600, Brandon Kim  
> <brandon.kim at brandontek.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Hello gents:
> >
> > I wanted to put this out there for all of you. Our network consists of a  
> > mixture of Cisco and Extreme equipment.
> >
> > Would you say that it's fair to say that if you are serious at all about  
> > being a service provider that your core equipment is Cisco based?
> >
> > Am I limiting myself by thinking that Cisco is the "de facto" vendor of  
> > choice? I'm not looking for so much "fanboy" responses, but more of a  
> > real world
> > experience of what you guys use that actually work and does the job.....
> >
> > No technical questions here, just general feedback. I try to follow the  
> > Tolly Group who compares products, and they continually show that Cisco  
> > equipment
> > is a poor performer in almost any equipment compared to others, I find  
> > that so hard to believe.....
> 
> Cisco is typically not known as the fastest or most power efficient when  
> compared to other vendors, but they usually have some advanced feature  
> sets that are very nice. In the ISP space this may be less helpful, but in  
> the SMB and Enterprise space this can be very helpful. Things such as Call  
> Manager Express, Web Content Filtering, WebEx Nodes, Server Load  
> Balancing, Wireless Lan Controllers, etc. that are either built into IOS  
> or available with a line card or module, are nice tools to have at your  
> disposal, and often can mean reducing the number of devices you need in  
> your rack.
> 
> As of the Tolly group, I find whomever pays Tolly for the survey tends to  
> be the fastest.
> 
> Example:
> Abstract:
> 
> HP commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance, power consumption and  
> TCO of its E5400 zl and E8200 switch series and compare those systems with  
> the Cisco Systems Catalyst 3750-X and Catalyst 4500.
> 
> This is because the Vendor is getting to pick what they want to benchmark  
> rather than the company benchmarking them. No one is going to choose tests  
> that their product will lose in. There isn't much in the way of "Tom's  
> Hardware Style" testing of enterprise gear to my knowledge.
> 
> Cisco gear is also known for long life, being very consistent, and high  
> reliability. A walk through colos you will often see many many Cisco  
> 12000's for those exact reasons.
> 
> I feel each vendor has its strong points, price/performance may not be  
> Cisco's but Cisco's ease of configuration and feature sets, along with  
> reliability are definitely notable.
> 
> -=Tom
> 
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Brandon
> >
> >  		 	   		
> 
> 
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