Re: Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?

["Thomas Donnelly" <tad1214 () gmail com>]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:31:32 -0600, Brandon Kim  
<brandon.kim () 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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