Alcatel-Lucent provides the OmniSwitch family of switches, providing data center switching, Ethernet & LAN switches, support for IoT and edge solutions, SDN, ruggedization and industrial-grade solutions, and WebSmart switches.
N/A
Cisco Catalyst Switches
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.
The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6900 series switch is highly robust, technological, and perfectly suited to our purpose. It is rich in advanced routing features including BGP, OSPF, static, 10Gb and SFP+ ports, 40GbE QSF+, and stability with redundancy across hardware. It is ideal and we recommend it for distribution and network core scenarios. The price is much lower than the big switch leaders.
I think the most suited ones will be of course, for example, a supermarket where you have more than 50 plus devices because there are like 48 ports in a switch. We can just use a lot of devices and connect them to it. A less use case will be, I think it depends at the end of the day how your topology looks like. If you have a very few devices, you shouldn't be going for these catalyst switches because they are of course much bigger, more processing power and all those things. If you have, again, it comes to topology. If you have the number of users who are using these switches is less than 15, it's less than 15, then you can just go for any other option and not use them.
One of the things that it does well, it's not something major, but there's a light tracking feature that the 9300 comes with that you can turn on the light and that has become critical in a data center environment where you want to help someone to make sure that you're talking about the same switch, you can turn the light on and off something that is not available in other versions of Cisco switches before the 9300. So it's not as major, but it's quite critical when you're dealing with multiple systems and multiple switches.
Functionality. Well, one of the functions that we are missing is a faster route based on OSPF. Other than that, it could provide an upgrade without a hitless upgrade. Well, now it is a very fast upgrade, which is also okay. We had a case when the platform crashed, but that was a specific case. We were happy with this product.
We are extremely happy with the Cisco Catalyst series and don't have any reason to switch. As long as we continue to get great use and service out of the products we'll continue to use them for the foreseeable future.
Like said before - I think there are better solutions in the market to solve the challenge rather than a physical appliance. Functionalities are there and capabilities are available, but, in my experience, they lack the inherent capacity a cloud solutions provides. Lacking on the capacity to have the flexibility and dynamic growth Cloud platforms enable.
Based on my previous experience with other vendors, Cisco is worlds apart. I can manage every feature I need with great flexibility. Other vendors that only provide web UI, limited functionality exists. The other benefit is that since Cisco has been a strong player for so long, their training is being done in some high schools now expanding the knowledge to more of the workforce.
We have very few is any outages due to a Cisco hardware failure. Some of our gear is exposed to some pretty harsh environments, and they keep on ticking!
No, the packets flow. Sometimes you will see collisions and broadcast storms can happen which will slow performance but that can be fixed and the packets will flow.
We rarely have issues with the product. I have only had to contact support one time since we put it in and that was to see if another vendor was giving me accurate information on an issue I was having.
Cisco Networking Academy partners with many local Colleges and High Schools to provide great hands-on training. You do need to drive to learn the topic. The in-class session only go so far. You really need to apply this to the real world. Cisco makes it easy for business to connect via CLC or Cisco Learning Credits.
The implementation of the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches is fairly seamless, especially if you are familiar with Cisco products. We have had Brocade switch gear in place too, and the differences between the manufacturers [are] not a major issue.
Most problems that face our company has been solved by an effective performance of this product. The operation and continuity of our business programs are boosted by great network connections. Alcatel company has been helpful in providing training and development guidelines where possible. The system performance has built a powerful operation base that can identify and provide solutions to business challenges. The digital working base for all our plans has been implemented.
We do have other vendors. For example, Juniper, Fortinet, and there are quite a few others. And Cisco is pretty good because we know the workflow, we know how the operating system works. We are much more familiar with Cisco products and we know the support system behind it. So in terms of comparing with others, I think it stands out. It's one of our top products to go to
We are exclusive Cisco at our organization. In truth part of the reason is, with one type of switch and one manufacturer, it is easier to support. It is also easier to give consistent training to our staff in our tech department
