Cisco Catalyst IE3400 Rugged Series Switches vs. HPE Aruba Ethernet Switches

Amazing network management and extremely perfect network security production and its notification options are very responsive. Creating real time analytics and the visualization capability is fantastic. This Cisco Catalyst platform has effective insights gathering tools and its data quality control functions are good and quick on process reports preparation and workflow easy management product.

Incentivized

We manage a lot of public infrastructure and schools which
means we need reliable hardware that is easy to prep and install quickly due to
time constraints. The price is great as we must keep a close eye on our budget.


We use these switches in all types of situations and
configurations some are full SFP and others are ethernet but honestly the software
and hardware are great for our usage.

Incentivized

• It runs no matter how hot it gets. It's actually operated at times when it was exceeding its operational limits and continued to work.

Incentivized

• REST API capability
• Wired & Wireless 802.1x configuration easiness
• Wireless Access Points (APs) zero touch provisioning
• Its high-end family (running the AOS-CX firmware) supports a virtualization technology called VSX (Virtual Switching Extension) which allows 2 switches to present itself as one virtualized switch under Layer 2, and as 2 separate routers under Layer 3; thereby providing high availability.

Incentivized

• The portdensity is poor (when compared to competition) which means that the IE-switches takes more space then competition.
• The price is not competitive, only possible to ship/sell to customers that are set on the Brand. To say that Cisco has more features (to motivate that these units cost more then the double) is not correct, the competition solves the same stuff differently.

Incentivized

• I have had issues finding monitoring software that natively supports Provision/Aruba OS. Most are designed primarily with Cisco in mind.
• HPE/Aruba switches have historically had issues with corrupt flash. This seems to be less common in more recent models.
• HPE/Aruba's switching portfolio can be confusing. Some models run on the Aruba OS while some others run on Comware. There is some overlap in these model lines so at times is can be tough to tell which switch is right.

Incentivized

The features are excellent. We have been able to utilize and customize the features

Incentivized

The support team cares about fast workflow. They have been helpful

Incentivized

It is a very good product, has almost all the feature you can need to access switches, a simple web GUI management, but not all can be configured from the GUI interface.

Incentivized

Originally, used rack mount routers with ACLs. However, cost in terms of energy and rack space made doing NAT that way was very expensive.

Incentivized

The HPE Aruba Switches are definitely easier to setup than Cisco Catalyst Switches. We prefer to have a managed interface, so the HPE Aruba Switches are a better option than most Netgear or D-Link switches. Compared to HPE Networking Switches, the Aruba models typically are cheaper and perform nearly as well

Incentivized

• Before implementing these switches, production lines were constantly stopped due to network failures. This had a huge financial impact on the company.
• In addition to mitigating those flaws, you now have complete network monitoring with the joint implementation of the Cisco Industrial Network Director.

Incentivized

• Ease of deployment has cut back on labor hours.
• Ease of management has allowed us to be more proactive to other potential issues that may occur on the network.

Incentivized