A few readers have made comments that I have negative about Cisco lately. The might have a point, but there too many other networking vendors left in the industry, so who else am I going to talk about ? Being a one eyed Ciscotist isn’t going to make interesting reading if I constantly spread the love and light that is living with Cisco.
BUT
In the interests of fairness and all round understanding of the issues here is your chance to tell me how you broadly feel about Cisco and your impressions of them on a scale of one to five.
Go. Sound off in the comments as usual.
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About Greg Ferro
I think Cisco makes superb routing and switch gear for the enterprise – there’s nothing else quite like it.
That being said, Cisco has not done a great job as a “security company” (MARS, anyone??? CSA???)
True enough that the line between security devices and network devices is blurry (if it even still exists) but I don’t see that Cisco is really a security partner.
That could change but it isn’t the case today IMHO.
CIsco products aren’t always best-of-breed, but they offer compelling end-to-end solutions. However, SMARTnet is pure evil.
I think Cisco is hard to get religious about. I use Cisco kit every day, their Tac is great, their products generally pretty good, i love the IOS, but the company is just ‘blah’.
Cisco’s biggest issue is their arrogance. I seem to expect our business. So I think it’s important we push back. Use the best product for the job, design without vendor in mind.
My account team has been getting a lot more pushy, and our costs for maintaining our Cisco voice infrastructure have been going up and up. I love Cisco for routing and switching, but for other stuff I’ve been getting a lot less excited about them.
That’s one reason behind me trying a career change (my last day as a network guy is Monday) ; Cisco just isn’t “fun” anymore.
I totally agree with Dan Hughes. I just love the Cisco equipment, especially the routing and switching gear. I notice that there is a “battle” between Cisco and other vendor in the Netherlands. Most managers tend too choose the cheapest solution, without consulting the technical engineers.
From a technical perspective I would choose Cisco for routing and switching. The feature set is just enormous and the troubleshooting capabilities are much better then most other vendors. But as Dan mentions, Cisco is just one big arrogant company. We are trying to arrange a partnership with Cisco, but after 2 months, hundreds of phone calls and e-mails we still have no result.
But it is good to broaden your horizon and also look at other vendors. We consultant our customers with the best solution for there network and every network is different. For some networks HP ProCurve covers the routing and switching, sometimes we choose CheckPoint or Juniper for firewalling and Aruba or Colubris for wireless solutions. Luckily Cisco isn’t the only player at the market….
Cisco hardware seems to be overpriced and their support contracts equally so. ProCurve FTW!! Free lifetime support for the life of the product? Free hardware replacement for as long as HP is a company? And still people buy Cisco! What am I missing??
Of course, I realize that ProCurve does not offer the same large scale routing and switching equipment as cisco does. For all but the most intense applications, ProCurve sends Cisco home crying, IMO.
HP ProCurve is still having some teething problems. Jeremy Gaddis has documented a number of problems and they ended up taking al the kit back. My impression: ProCurve isn’t quite ready, but will be in a year or two.