Re: Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jan 10, 2011, at 11:35 AM, Andrey Khomyakov wrote:

> There have been awfully too many time when Cisco TAC would just say that
> since the problem you are trying to troubleshoot is between Cisco and
> VendorX, we can't help you. You should have bought Cisco for both sides.
> I had that happen when I was troubleshooting LLDP between 3750s and Avaya
> phones, TACACS between Cisco and tac_plus daemon, link bundling between
> juniper EX and Cisco, some obscure switching issues between CAT and
> Procurves and other examples like that just don't recall them anymore.
This has been my justification in the past for buying Cisco for neither side the
next time.

I've never had Juniper tell me that until they could show clearly that the
misbehaving item was the brand C hardware on the other side. They even
went so far as to provide me very detailed analysis of the exact form of
misbehavior in the brand C gear and offered to talk to the C-TAC if I
could arrange it in order to better communicate the problem.

While I'm not sure this is the usual behavior of the J-TAC, I can say that
the C-TAC behavior described above is all too common.

> Every time I'm reminded that if you have a lot of Cisco on the network, the
> rest should be cisco too, unless there is a very good technical/financial
> reason for it, but you should be prepared to be your own help in those
> cases.
A network-equipment vendor that won't help you resolve interoperability
problems with equipment they didn't build (BTW, I've had C-TAC refuse
to resolve problems between different business units of C-Gear, too) IS
a reason to buy from other vendors, IMHO.

> Vendors love to point at the other vendors for solutions. At least in my
> experience.
Good vendors don't do that. Vendors that do that don't get my business.
Vote with your feet and your $$.

My $.0.2.

> My $0.02
>
> Andrey
Owen