Who Makes the Best Networking Hardware and Why?

[radderfire]

Hi Guys

I'm interested to know who you think makes the best networking hardware? Who would you use if you had to install a network for a small, medium or large office? Why do you like their products?

Thanks

 

[Armageus]

Small businesses:
Netgear switches (metal cased) - cheap, cheerful and just work
Cisco small business switches are another decent option nowadays - bit more expensive but feel quality.
Draytek router - does everything you could possibly need and again just works
Unifi WiFi - relatively cheap, flexible and high performance

Medium:
Hpe/Aruba switches - high reliability, long firmware support, common and relatively cheap parts e.g. for 5400R ZL2 chassis.
PFSense/OPNSense or similar for router on commodity server hardware - excellent reliability and redundancy, supremely flexible.
Unifi WiFi - as above, but price is main factor compared to "enterprise" brands offering similar features.

Large:
???? I'm not quite there yet

 

[Caged]

This is an interesting question, it smells a bit like you might be outsourcing some work to the forums.

There's no such thing as "best" because different people have different priorities. Splitting into small/medium/large office sizes is the wrong approach as well - an office of 12 hedge fund staff will have much higher budgets and reliability requirements than 250 people making outbound spam calls to try and sell you warranty extensions on a fridge.

 

[radderfire]

There's no such thing as "best" because different people have different priorities. Splitting into small/medium/large office sizes is the wrong approach as well - an office of 12 hedge fund staff will have much higher budgets and reliability requirements than 250 people making outbound spam calls to try and sell you warranty extensions on a fridge.

What's your opinion on the highest quality manufacturers then? Who is best for high performance for someone with a big budget?

 

[Caged]

You don't try and find the high quality manufacturer and hope that means everything will run for five years, you build in resilience. The product selection will be heavily influenced by what your team are comfortable working with.

Top tier vendors would be Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, Arista, Extreme.

 

[Oh Ed not again.]

Paging @WJA96 ...

 

[Armageus]

Miktotik is another one to add to the small-medium business section imo. Again supremely flexible hardware, often with features punching well above it's price tag. Trade off is normally the time/learning curve to set them up, so ideal if you are time rich, cash poor as most growing smaller businesses are.

 

[Glanza]

Aruba is our go to for small / mid size business deployments, would happily have one of their AP at home if it was required.