Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.
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Extreme Wireless Access Points
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Extreme Networks' Wireless Access Points (or ExtremeWireless) are designed to provide performance in the most demanding environments with the latest Wi-Fi technologies including 6 GHz, OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and software-defined dual 6 GHz radios.
Well-suited for big companies like mine, where we have a lot of users that we have to connect together. Getting all the switches into one big stack that you can just manage all at one time is fantastic for ease of use. Not suited for maybe smaller mom and pop shops or smaller companies that don’t have as many. They could probably go with something much easier to manage.
The Extreme access point solution has been used in the cooperative scenario with VLANs for employees in access through 802.1x authentication and also for guests through the captive portal that allows access of people for a limited time and prior registration. The equipment has great performance and connection speed and supports a high density of users connected at the same time without lag and crashes. The management of this equipment is being carried out through software with cloud management and is accessed by our infrastructure team to configure and monitor alerts.
Easy-to-use management interfaces. The CLI commands go across the whole Cisco Catalyst Switches 9000 series, so it makes it easy, the code being the same on the 9000 series. Just being able to do port channels, trunks, and connecting up edge switches to it with the Cisco Catalyst Switches 9000 Series.
Ease of use and Management. The process of implementing APs is straight forward and managing the wireless infrastructure is quite simple and efficient.
Coverage: we are very happy with the distance each AP coverages in our warehouses without having any drop issues or over implementing APs.
Cost competitive versus other cloud managed wi-fi solutions such as Cisco, Aruba or Mist.
One thing is that these, every time Cisco gets a new switch, they just make an amendment to the power supply, so they'll just put a knob on it. So let's say if you lose any power supply unit, you'll have to purchase another one, which costs a lot of extra money because we have a lot of another power supply units from the redundant, which we can use, but we can't now because they have just tweaked the modeling of that. Which makes no sense, particularly to me because it's an extra money making machine kind of a thing. But that's fine.
Another thing is these ports, I believe they are a bit less of, if I can say the quality of the oldest switches, they were quite sturdy. As I said earlier, the new switches, they're very light and when you lift them you feel it. So that's one thing, which I think the quality or the material which we are using has gone down.
In my experience, licensing has become a nightmare. Licensing must be tied to a device, they also won't let you activate used units from other companies if they are donated or purchased third-party.
Customer service is outsourced overseas.
In my experience, technicians are incentivized to close tickets quickly - whether the issue has been fixed or not - which can be frustrating to work with.
They are consistently reliable and this switch in particular is a very affordable solution. We can place the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches gear in areas that we normally would not place a switch because it is affordable enough to make it justifiable. And because it is a reliable solution, we are confident it will continue to provide service over the long haul.
Cisco by and far does a great job with the Catalyst line. From a layer 2 dumb switch all the way up to ISP carrier grade switching within the Catalyst portfolio. The best part about it is command parity among the various tiers of product. The only differences are going to lie in what features are available per switch.
Extreme Wireless Access Points are easy to manage. They are easy to deploy and install. The hardware and firmware are reliable. There a number of things to be improved since we are still using the WiNG platform, but all of those things will be much better when we migrate to CloudIQ.
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.
Extreme Wireless Access Points can support all our devices, even in high capacity areas. They are easy to manage and get basic information. There was a time back around 2017-2018 where people's devices needed to make sure they were using the latest wireless drivers; otherwise, people were having connection issues. Other than that time period, we were able to have fewer complaints from end users.
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.
Support was always responsive and willing to help, but at times did not know when to call it and send a replacement to stop the bleeding. I respect that fact that they wanted to get the solution working, and the wanting to learn more and understand, but at times you cant do that at the expense of the customer.
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.
2960s, 9200s, 9400s, 3650s, 3800s. I think that this product is a lot better. I know I just complained about the noise, but it’s still much quieter than our other ones. So we do have a couple of public deployments, and once we swap these out, they complained less. Sometimes we have small offices that get the gear in with them, and these sound less like a jet engine. And yeah, these are a lot easier to manage as well. Everything in the same family. It’s a lot.
I've used both Aruba and Cisco (traditional, not Meraki) for wireless, and each have their own strengths. Aruba offers a lot of feature functionality, though the interface is difficult and confusing to use (this was ~4 years ago). Cisco wireless is fairly straightforward to set up and expand, though features are more limited. Aerohive's benefit is the easy+speed of deployment. I've also used the Citrix NetScaler SSL VPN soft client and that works fairly well, though it doesn't compare like-for-like due to the fact that it's software vs. Aerohive, which is hardware.
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
Linking APs to AD, via NPS, and gaining the password reset policy; helped us move past some issues that we were held up on with SOC
Segregating corporate wifi and guest wifi, plus forcing guest wifi to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy, was needed to pass a compliance audit of the network.
Being able to locate which users are connected to which individual wifi AP, has been a asset with troubleshooting
APs sharing connections allows for us to overlap the wifi zones and create redundancy if an AP were to go offline for any reason.
