Opinions on Alternatives to Cisco Routers?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm currently working on a project that is 'partnered' with Cisco. Despite that they make good routers, the company's relatively large size does not appear to be willing to meeting unique, customized, requirements. So what are your opinions of the alternatives: 3com, Juniper, etc? Anyone had bad/good experience with these companies? Are all their routers really essentially the same? How about comparative performance with totally customized routing solutions via Linux+Zebra or some other open solution?"

Comments

my question....

[Anonymous Coward]

what could you possibly require that you need cisco to customize their stuff for you? with all the software/hardware coming out of that company, how's it possible that something doesnt quite entirely cover everything you need?

Cisco partner, cisco equipment

[greywar]

Don't for a instant use some elses-cisco WILL take it as a slap in the face. If you need something custom-goto someone on their end in charge, and request either the equipment, or someone whom they approve that WILL do what you want. I've dealt with Cisco before.

Will your customers accept non-Cisco equipment ?

[MerlynEmrys67]

I know of several IT shops that will not allow non Cisco equipment into their infrastructure. Would make it hard (if not impossible) to qualify for those accounts.

That said - what kind of customization are you looking for... Cisco is the gold standard on most things IP infrastructure these days.

My experience

[jgaynor]

In my experience, Cisco can meet basically any NEED you have. A good sales engineer can fulfill almost any scenario and guarantee that it will work. The biggest downside with Cisco is, undeniably, price.

Matching the featureset of a cisco installation with zebra? easy.

Matching the performance of a cisco box with Linux and Zebra? uh-uh. Not gonna happen. For a small installations maybe, but not when performance or load is involved.

Why? Cisco does everything in hardware (ASICS). You can't meet performance like that with a PCI nic and the various bottlenecks associated with standard PC-based architecture. Juniper realized this and made a business model out of it. The took some open-source OS (which I can't remember right now - BSD?) and added support for network-task specific hardware. They can match cisco on performance and load-capability if not on product line. And they do it for ALOT less. My suggestion - take a look at juniper, then throw the juni quote back in your Cisco reps face. See if you can get him to bend a little :).

Re:My experience

[Urgoll]

You're talking about the PIX - Cisco's firewall product line. Those are software only, and if you pirate the software you can easily clone it.

But the real iron does everything in hardware (except error handling).

Re:My experience

[ebrandsberg]

Methinks you haven't looked at what can be done with a PC these days. I work for a company that provides hardware that front-ends the largest websites in the world, and it's Intel hardware with PCI-X bus support, and PCI-X NIC's. These boxes can drive over 4Gb/s of traffic. How many networks drive that much traffic? The point is that with the right software, the hardware can fly. The hard part is the software. If you do the math, a 33mhz 32 bit PCI bus can handle about 1Gb/s, which if run equal xmit and receive, comes to 512Mb/s. A 64 bit 66mhz comes to about 4Gb/s. A 133Mhz 64 bit PCI bus does 8Gb/s, and gig cards now support this. So, even if you drive four Gig cards at wire speed, you are just reaching the top capacity of a single 133Mhz 64 bit PCI bus. Now consider that higher-end motherboards now have more than one PCI bus that can run at this speed, and a PC can make a very good alternative to a router. Again, the key is the software...

Re:My experience

[pyite]

Can I slap an OC-48 card in a PC? Unlikely. OC-192? How about 10GigE? Again, unlikely. For some of us, PCs can't compete with dedicated routing hardware. Even PCs that can handle large amounts of traffic can't switch at wirespeed. The key is programmable ASICs, pure and simple. If it's hitting the CPU too often (which all switching/routing on a PC must do) then we have a problem.

"OpenBSD will soon rule the router world!"

[Pegasus]

Or at least that's what some would want :) Which would be interesting to see ...

Anyway, they already have good failover support for their firewall, nice bgpd, support for T1 hardware was recently merged into -current ... Theo himself is looking into replacing ciscos with OpenBSD.

Something good will come out of it, i'm sure ...

Re:Will your customers accept non-Cisco equipment

[dublin]

I know of several IT shops that will not allow non Cisco equipment into their infrastructure. Would make it hard (if not impossible) to qualify for those accounts.

Cisco is good, but they're by no means in a class all their own from a performance or capability point of view. Personally, I've found Extreme Networks can often offer considerably higher performance at a price that's a bit lower than Cisco's - and the care and feeding of Extreme's gear is *way* easier than Cisco's, too, which is a cost that you should NOT ignore...

I have nothing against Cisco, but Extreme "gets" performance far more than Cisco - for instance, Extreme's gigabit switches have deeper buffers than Cisco's which is irrelevant for most networking tasks, but shows up big-time when you try to do something serious like, say, storage-over-IP, or a cable head-end: it's just way too easy to overrun Cisco's buffers and wind up with your data all over the floor. Of course, if you ever have to retransmit anything because of this, the huge latency involved in that obliterates any chance of good performance. Extreme's engineers know this, and design their gear accordingly.

I'd suggest giving them a chance as an alternative vendor. (I have no relationship with Extreme, either, except as one pleasantly surprised by the company on several occasions.)