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3com to Compete with Cisco
RNelson writes "3com has announced its new lines of routers poised to compete with Cisco. 'The company claims that these routers will cost 30 percent to 50 percent less than similar offerings from market leader Cisco.' The new routers compete the Cisco's 3725, 3745, and 83xx routers."
If I recall, Cisco owns Linksys....
-beaker
Get a 256MB CF card from them. They'll hit you for 800 Bucks, and its not even cisco-branded, its just a SMART.
3Com used to be in the higher end switching market with pretty big gear - the Corebuilder 9000 was their high end chassis and was NICE. In fact, at one point (1999), they were the number two vendor in the market right behind Cisco. After working with 3Com and Cisco for a replacement of my campus network (I managed the network group at a college at the time), I selected 3Com based on the equipment features and the VERY attractive price in relation to the Cisco solution. The sales reps from 3Com were confident in the solution and in the support we'd get from 3Com moving forward
Two months after my installation was complete, 3Com EXITED the market. Yes - they immediately discontinued ALL of the brand new gear that we had just purchased. No notice. On a Monday morning, it was in the papers.
They botched their rep ALL over the place. I doubt I'd touch their new gear with a 10 foot pole. They're one of the flakiest companies I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Good gear, but absolutely horrid management.
Okay, so recently I had the misfortune of using some 3com NICs in FreeBSD servers for a project. I hereby swear off the use of 3com cards. I notice that on multiple switches the thruput is horrible (Cabletron ELS and 7C, Netgear, Cisco 5513).
:-) Look for copyrights and look up the no-names you see on the copyrights.
Also, where I used to work they bought a 3com RAS solution. The CLI was pretty bad compared to my favorite at the time, Livingston Portmasters. It was overpriced, and just seemed like a botched design with the CPU in one box and a $2000 add on with 4 modems in it.
Some people seem to have a thing for 3com. I think it is mostly the people that used their cards when 3com was the major player. Their earlier switches do seem rugged, but I'd probably look to SMC Tigerswitch (owned by Enterasys now?) before 3com for a SOHO deployment. I'm odd, even for SOHO I like managed switches and rackmount. And metal boxes, I dig NetGears form factors. PS, is NetGear still tied to Bay? Bay was sold to Nortel, Netgear used to be Bay Networks. Is Netgear Notel or the existing Bay Networks? Confusion.
I'd imagine it is management that plauges 3com. They announced the end of all high end products a while ago, since Cisco's market share was owning them (and others like Riverstone, Extreme, Enterasys, Foundry). They wanted to concentrate on their NICs (one word, intel Pro 10/100) and little baby network devices.
Cisco dominates the market. I own a few pieces of Cisco gear, ALOT of Cabletron/Enterasys surplus and many of the smaller vendors. Cisco gear is indeed nice, I like it but there is a premium to be paid (unless your like me and buy from eBay, a practice Cisco tried unsuccessfully to stop).
There have been alot of small players that might have competed but the major players buy them up. Prominet got bought by Lucent, their products became the Cajun family (and Intel resold some of their stuff). There are others (ELS series from Cabletron was a smaller company that got bought out). You can see it when you dig thru the firmware binaries
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I love it when bean counters decide that years of end-user pain and agony is worth $500 or $1000 savings on a cheap piece of hardware.
I've installed, maintained, configured, and troubleshooted hundreds of routers over the past 10 years. Hardware costs are not the only thing to consider. If you think saving 30%-50% in hardware costs is great, how about spending 200% more in labor costs, year after year? How about outfitting your NOC with an expensive new monitoring package exclusively designed for your new hardware? How about facing growth limits? How about watching your network go from 99.9999% uptime to something less?
What do you tell your customer/client base? "We're saving $1000 per router. I'm sorry that you'll have to live with ______ and ______ for the next few years." What is that worth to you? When there is trouble, listen to the vendors bicker over the reason(s). What is it worth to wait 1 year or more for a bug fix? And then discover that in order to get that bug fix, you might have to buy new hardware?
People don't realize what's involved in building a network. Reliability, room-for-growth, and features are everything. There are problems in every network. Giving your users a productive, working environment is the ultimate goal. Gambling with new hardware is not something I'd like to do very often.
I can guarantee this: I'll pay double for a reliable piece of hardware that does EXACTLY what I want, all the time when I know that the other end is the same brand of hardware. Plus, the carrier in between is using the same hardware. Plus, it's been lab tested by everyone. It gets better: One phone call and all my problems and answers are readily available. Every one of those things saves time and money. User experience is more positive because features are better, and there isn't any finger pointing between hardware vendors. I don't have to spend money buying multiple hardware platforms to labtest. I don't have to worry about mixed-vendor networks. Have you ever installed a mixed-vendor network? It's one of the most painful experiences you could ever have. I would put it right up there with kidney stones, and having fingernails forcibly removed with a pair of pliers.
Bean counters that want cheap hardware are usually going to pay increased labor costs. They will have workarounds and painful experiences for their end-users. It's NOT WORTH IT! If you want 99.9999% uptime, error-free performance, buy the best product available.
Cheap hardware is almost always feature-less, inflexible, and painful to live with. How many people remember 3Com's last go-around with routers? Easy to configure, but limited flexibility, and lacking features makes it harder to live with in the long run. Oh, and darn near impossible to troubleshoot. We had to outfit all of our technicians with $100K protocol analyzers to prove the trouble to cheap 3Com (and other) hardware because of the finger-pointing.
Look at it another way: If you're buying a Cadillac for the home office, why would you buy a Ford Pinto for the remote offices? It doesn't make sense. If you were building a space shuttle... are you going to use the cheapest hardware? Why would you do that with your network? There's a reason why Cisco has 90% of the market. Cisco has the most features. Everything hinges on software. While there are bugs in software, Cisco OS is fantastic. Features like EIGRP and HSRP make Cisco worthwhile. Interoperability with Cisco's LAN equipment make it worthwhile. Also, think about training, grey market materials, and used goods. Cisco is out there, commonly available. If you pick 3Com access routers, you've got to hire/train people to handle a new brand of unknown hardware. Training is expensive. And if your best-trained expert leaves, you've got to go find someone else. Finding Cisco people is easier.
People talk about Juniper. Juniper excels at one specific niche. The big, big router... basically IP to OC48 stuff. How many of those do you need? Juniper talks about the "pepsi challenge", but frankly, they'll have to go over and above Cisco to win my vote. There are other products, but you still end up with a mixed-vendor network.
-- No sig for you!