Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches vs. Juniper EX Series Switches

Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches are well suited for data closets in today’s ever expanding network system requirements. Today’s businesses rely on stable, fast, and highly available data connectivity. Businesses perform at such a quick pace now and the need to consume data resources is an integral part of most every business function. There can no longer be outages. Slow data connectivity and sluggish system response is directly related to business success. The Cisco Catalyst platform has provided our company with a network foundation that is fast and reliable so that the business can concentrate on what they do best.

Incentivized

They work great as core switches, data center switches, top of rack switches. They can even serve as routers, their routing capability is great, except for where you need lots of routing processing power. I would not use many of them for branch office switches though, due to noise and slowness of bootup

Incentivized

• The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches provide reliable connectivity for multiple client device types whether computers, phones, wireless access points, etc.
• The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches has deployment flexibility from traditional IOS-XE deployments to Cisco Catalyst SD-Access and now Meraki monitored solutions.
• Multiple switch models allow us to customize each data closet deployment to exactly fit the port density and power-over-Ethernet requirements.

Incentivized

• Very stable.
• Cost efficient
• Easy management
• Great Juniper 24*7 TAC support
• Different variants available for different requirements.
• Easy to replace faulty hardware

Incentivized

• Software needs improvement, where features are added (Stack wise) or removed (GLBP) without solicitation from a wider audience or depreciation, respectively
• Software bugs recently in basic features like AAA
• Ability to turn off all unused services or features to reduce the attack surface
• Cisco CoPP functionality is not like it was on the Cat 6k platform - users cannot create custom policies for use at the control-plane interface

Incentivized

• Virtual chassis new switch has overwritten existing config if not performed in a particular way.
• Applying a configuration to a range of interfaces could be done in a better way.
• Applying firewall rules to multiple security zones could be done a little more efficiently.

Incentivized

The Juniper EX Series Switches are very easy to configure and quick to deploy. The ability to make changes and troubleshoot issues is top-rated. I have never had trouble contacting support. They also have many knowledge articles on use. Always adding new features to the Juniper Mist Dashboard for easy visibility into your network

Incentivized

Many times when contacting Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support, it seems that it is easiest for support to recommend a straight replacement (RMA) instead of taking time to walk through a solution on the faulty system. We find we get better help from a third-party consulting firm that has Juniper certified technicians or professionals on staff. They take the time to explain processes and workflow, which Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support seems to shy away from.

Incentivized

The Catalyst switches definitely have a more robust feature set than the Meraki switches but the Meraki switches are intended for a different use case than the Catalyst switches. We used Catalyst switches in our wiring closets because they fit in better with the topology and feature sets that we wanted to deploy.

Incentivized

The rollback, commit and confirm are the biggest players in the game. Juniper is the only one who has those features, so I believe they have a leg up in the game. The CLI is one of the easiest to work with.

Incentivized

• Don't need to buy services - lifetime warranty
• Stability - even 10 year old devices are still running and doing the job
• Sometimes lines of products are on the market for a very short time (eg. 6800 instant access) - it is hard to buy equipment to make the network bigger.

Incentivized

• From a user's point of view, the ease of configuration and management has been incredible. Much less time is spent maintaining Juniper than previous solutions.
• From a reseller's point of a view, Juniper is excellent. They treat small partners like us very well even if our volume is not huge. Juniper switches are part of our standard solution that has been great for our customers.

Incentivized