Juniper vs. Cisco
 

I'm wondering if anyone has any input on which is the better outfit to go with. I am particularly interested in someone who has experience with Juniper's EX series and/or Cisco's Catalyst 6500 and 3750 lines.

Thanks.

I'm pretty heavily experienced with both the Cat6500 and 3750's.

With the 6500's, make sure you understand what features you want from it, and make sure that it supports them is the key - this is a hardware platform and certain features aren't fully supported (such as some netflow bits etc..etc..)

The 3750's have been pretty reliable in my experience, but I wouldn't advise putting more than a couple in a single stack as the master deals with the CPU processing (or did a while back) so in a large stack of say 4 - 7 switches you used to experience high utilisation of the CPU and lower performance.

I've not had any experience with the Juniper switches yet, but based on their routing platforms, I would expect them to do exactly what they say on the tin (unlike some of the Cisco range ;))

Thanks. Every comparison that I've made between Cisco and Juniper shows Juniper's hardware as the better choice (better backplane, more PoE ports, etc). Management and cost are entirely different issues. I just wanted to see whether it is just Marketing tactics or is it for real and since I don't have the luxury of testing one out, I figured I'd ask the experts here. I am still to hear from anyone with Juniper experience. Appreciate your input.

Cisco, Juniper or others?
 

Well, i just went through the process of evaluating the right product for one of our projects. I was selecting between Juniper, Cisco, and Force10
Here is what i came up with..
Our site routing will be done with 2 x Force10 E1200 Chassis. Each Datacenter on site will run on Juniper M10i or Force10 E600 Routers.

So, Cisco didnt make it through our eval process.

maikj,

What are you using for your access layer? What switches?

Thanks.
TB

Access Layer Switching
 

Depending on additional needs, we will use the Force10 S50N or S2410S for the Access Layer.

Cisco is always the "safe" choice, however I wouldn't buy into such an old platform as the 6500 any longer. For price and performance, I would go with Foundry (now Brocade). I have used them for over 5 years now, and having formerly been a Cisco biased engineer, I can tell you I got much more bang for my buck getting rid of the Catalyst 6500 platform and going to the NetIron platform. The NetIron platform may be more than what you need, so you could get a BigIron RX series setup.

I wouldn't suggest Force10. They seem to have some issues when it comes to routing. If you're just looking for switching, they may be alright. Juniper is good gear, there is just a learning curve and additional cost that I do not see being justified.

Just my $.02.

Force 10
 

I agree with you on some of the bugs that existed in the Force 10 Routing.
That's why most folks out there used juniper at the perimeter and the force 10 for aggregation.
However, things with force 10 evolved and those L2-L3 boundary issues are a thing of the past.

No doubt, both are good but its true that most of the world’s service providers choose Juniper over Cisco for security and routing solutions.