Joshua Rowe wrote: > This should maybe be a new thread, and I'm not sure Tom is making this point > or not,, but I agree, would you trust your CORE to anything but Cisco? I'm > not sure I would.
Cisco gear is well-supported and pretty darned solid, but is often many times as expensive as the next-best alternative, and the benefits don't always justify the drastically increased cost. Example: For three years, my core router was a cheap rackmount PC running Mikrotik's RouterOS on a flash card. That server cost about $1000 when bought, and replaced a Cisco 3640 that originally cost over $10,000 but couldn't handle the load of my growing network. Despite Cisco's performance claims, the poor thing couldn't really handle more than about 10Mbps of constant traffic with a single BGP peer. The only reason the Mikrotik got replaced was because of CALEA issues (this was early last year, before Mikrotik added a CALEA package to their software). Its replacement was an Imagestream Rebel, which again was about 1/5 the cost of a comparably-specced Cisco 3700 series. (And yes, this was through a Cisco reseller, not list price, we all know that nobody ever pays Cisco list price unless they're mad.) I like Cisco gear, really I do. I love the fact that everything uses essentially the same command set, and that you can do pretty much anything with a Cisco of some sort. I still have a few older routers (for T1s) and a number of their switches in my NOC. However, for many smaller networks on a budget, there are plenty of alternatives that will work just as well, if not better. David Smith MVN.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
