I was talking with a few close friends who work full time for ISPs around in the United States and it got on the topic of networking hardware.
Now, I will 100% admit this isn't my strong suite and I really need to brush up even more on my reading, but what do you look for in networking hardware? Is it the software/OS (e.g. JunOS), is it the warranty (if applicable) that comes with it? Is it the actual hardware?
Apparently there's a company attempting to set a standard platform for the Ethernet switches for all the different switch operating systems named
WhiteBox. Unlike Cisco and Juniper Networks hardware who come with their own respective operating systems, these switches comes with Cumulus Linux. Would you trust/use an alternative/open-source solution? Or would you rather invest in Cisco or Juniper Network Hardware?
Basically... what makes people go for Cisco/Juniper Network/Ubiquiti/Brocade hardware?
I can't speak for Brocade anymore because their stuff is still buggy, and I don't know anything with Ubiquiti.
Back in the mid 1990s, the first true network device i ever messed with was a 7206VXR, which was a pile of shit in a way because of it's crippled hardware<->software. It was massively expensive, too. But, cisco devices /were/ the way to go for switching and routing (baynetworks had good switches but they were more expensive than cisco, same with alpine gigE)
Everyone practically was a cisco shop, and if you were not, you were not an ISP. Once that mindset came across to the elite N.E's of various providers like exodus, psinet, globix and others, you'd be hard pressed to even do business without using cisco.
Since that has occurred, you had a massive amount of market share from cisco, until people realized in the early 2000s you can go to juniper to get core switching gear that can do more for less. Only problem is, no one wanted to use a CLI that wasn't just like IOS. So early s/w versions of junipers gear was terrible and was not IOS-like. But, Juniper learned and so did the others, as long as you made a cli that was similar to ciscos (and not to the point where they could sue you) your 'shop' could adapt to using different vendors.
Brocade/Foundry stuff is pretty awful due to 'quirks' they have to use for their onboard ASICs from the software point of view and other general nonsense.
Personally, Cisco stuff still works, but it's still expensive to buy outright. I always have a special place in my heart for IOS because it's the defacto standard, and you at least know on paper of a devices actual PPS. Juniper isn't bad either, since they use FreeBSD for their management engine OS (and they've contributed code back, unlike the open source liars Linksys, Dlink and others). I don't really trust using 'linux' for a mission critical switch, to be honest.
Just remember, keep it simple. Don't buy a switch/route a sales guy is trying to get you to buy, research it for your needs. Check it's PPS. Check to make sure you need layer3 (or dont). Cisco is still great with 24/7/365/4hr TAC support, unsure of Juniper. And for gods sake, stay away from no name companies.
In a nutshell, I look for this
1.) Switch performance. This is in raw PPS with a MTU of 1500. The higher, the better.
2.) Port latency. This is a little difficult to get through some vendors, but lower latency under load usually means the switch is pretty CPU for store and forward.
3.) Jumbo frame support. This is great for my local networks for doing high bandwidth transfers and an MTU of 1500 just has too much overhead; A high MTU (4096 or 9044) will allow the OS to use something called 'page flipping' which reduces CPU overhead doing copy-on-writes from the nic card
4.) VLAN tagging. Useful to do isolation.
5.) Basic layer3/4 features like BGP (hard to find unless you want a large 48 port switch) or OSPF.
