Who Makes the Best Networking Hardware and Why?

radderfire

radderfire

radderfire

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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
 
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
 
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.
 
Caged said:
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.
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What's your opinion on the highest quality manufacturers then? Who is best for high performance for someone with a big budget?
 
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.
 
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.
 
This is a tougher question to answer than it used to be and absolutely depends on the situation/budget. I don't touch Netgear anymore, the Professional stuff just doesn't last as well as it should and the consumer stuff is even worse - I want to put something in place and literally not touch it again till it's time to upgrade it. TP Link SMB class switches are my new go-to in that respect, once you start scaling up and want PoE and management that's more likely Aruba (HP) which includes the option of AP's. That said, i'm currently running a mix of Deco and Unifi AP's because my usual software router set-up has been replaced by a UDM Pro and it hasn't annoyed me enough to be replaced... yet.
 
Juniper, Cisco, nvidia. Enterprise it depends I like using nvidia for 25g and 100g but now they have discontinued some I will look again.
 
radderfire said:
I'm interested to know who you think makes the best networking hardware?
Click to expand...

Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.

If you're building data centres, the requirements are completely different to if you're building internet POPs, and again are totally different to if you're building a campus LAN.

Many of the vendors have their own strengths and weaknesses, none of them are the 'best' in all of the areas.

Nowadays many of the vendors are using very similar hardware (commodity broadcom chips), so the real big differences are in the motherboards, physical characteristics, than the software and feature sets.

Then there's the design, if you properly understand the requirements and the problem you're trying to solve - designing the system properly will always yield better results, than obsessing over a particular vendor.
 
Medium or large, Juniper or Cisco. Juniper mean time to failure of a mist AP is 500k hours, for example. But without the skills or support then you want something you can configure so Aruba or Ubiquiti. Possibly cisco meraki for medium size. Domestic, any home router with potential mesh APs will be fine you're not going to be doing anything more complex that's worth the cost.
 
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