Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) vs Huawei Ethernet Switches

Likelihood to Recommend

I can recommend this ASR 9000 Series model for the locations which are very Big like data centers, large offices, and service provider networks. Which will enhance the performance. We cannot use this router in small deployments. This is an advanced technology model which has many features like orchestrating services across a converged network and enabling on-demand service capabilities.

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Mohd Shahid Ali

Pre-Sales Network Consultant

Al Khalili GroupInformation Technology & Services, 51-200 employees

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Huawei switches are ideal for cases where performance is not essential, for low traffic solutions and for equipment management. It is not recommended for situations of high performance and stress, immediate availability and high scalability. It is also not advisable to use them in solutions that involve hardware from other brands, the integration of Huawei with Cisco, for example, is very traumatic and the results were not optimal in my case.

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Amilcar Jose Salazar Siry

Lider de proyectos

CANTVTelecommunications, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

[Cisco 9000] Series [Aggregation Services] Routers are exceptionally reliable when compared to other market options.
One strength of Cisco routers, in general, is their compatibility with any standard market tools from other vendors.
[It is] unmatched in terms of sheer performance.
[It] comfortably supports very strong throughput requirements.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Scalability
High throughput links
Redundancy of links with resilient protocols
Fast switching in the event of a redundant link failure.

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Gilson Jose do Nascimento

Network Engineer

ALOO TELECOMTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

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Cons

[The] upgrade process [is] overly complicated compared to NX-OS or IOS. New images and the current configuration need to be compiled into "golden IOS's". If you don't include the configuration, you will have a clean device with no configuration.
[There are] major bugs in every release. We have had to cycle through all of our routers 3 times in the last year for updates due to show-stopping bugs that did not come to light until after the changes were made in production.
[It has] terrible documentation. You have to mine their site to get to any documentation for recent versions of IOS-XR. If you make the leap from 32-bit cXR to 64-bit eXR, then the documentation is more or less non-existent. Due to the internal architecture of hardware itself, technical specs can change from software version to software version, so don't expect any sort of firm scalability numbers. You'll have to rely on your sales engineer for that.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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One of our switches encounted a hardware defect after 6 months of use (but was replaced within warranty)
The switches appear to get hotter than what I would expect under normal use

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Dylan Eikelenboom

Security Officer

IXON CloudInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

—

Usability

Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) 9.1

Based on 1 answer

[I am] always impressed with Cisco products, from the functionality to the customer support.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology

Military Company, 10,001+ employees

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No score

No answers yet

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Support Rating

Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) 5.5

Based on 7 answers

In some ways, the platform is a big improvement over our previous IOS and NX-OS devices: They offer version-controlled configuration staging/commits. They have a robust portfolio of network protocols and features even beyond datacenter devices. Due to the use of NPUs instead of relying entirely on ASICs for forwarding, new versions of the software are able to improve hardware performance and capacity. Unfortunately, I have run into more bugs on IOS-XR than I ever did on IOS or even NX-OS (which has a shocking number of bugs of its own) and you have to be a licensing guru to get your order right the first time.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Juniper was more security/less routing and Cisco was more routing/less security. Redback was Ericsson which is easy when creating VRFs known as contexts. When doing [the] show command, it would give you all the information within that context. In Cisco, you need to perform 3 or more commands to get the same info.

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Verified User

General Manager in Other

Telecommunications Company, 501-1000 employees

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The performance of Huawei is lower than Cisco, but initially the costs inclined the decision towards Huawei, but unfortunately, it was not, the licenses and the manager fired the investment to make it very similar to cisco. Therefore it is preferable to go to the Cisco switches for reliability and robustness.

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Amilcar Jose Salazar Siry

Lider de proyectos

CANTVTelecommunications, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Higher reliability has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention.
Lower downtime ensures better top-line figures.
Although it may be difficult to quantify, I am certain that the higher performance does have an impact (maybe indirectly) on other business functions. High-performance routers are like the oil that keeps an engine running smoothly.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Revenue Increase
Greater satisfaction for our customers.
Greater compliance with SLAs

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Gilson Jose do Nascimento

Network Engineer

ALOO TELECOMTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

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Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) vs Huawei Ethernet Switches