Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.
N/A
Juniper MX Series
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Juniper Networks describes their MX series as a robust portfolio of SDN-enabled routing platforms that provide system capacity, density, security, and performance with longevity. MX Series routers support digital transformation for service providers, cloud operators, and enterprises.
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.
I think the Juniper MX series is a fantastic option for data center connectivity and places that aren't very high touch, but need good reliability and uptime. These switches are a bit more difficult to use day to day, but their reliability and robustness make them a great fit for data centers.
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.
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.
Working with Juniper switches can be a bit of a chore compared to other brands, like Cisco or HP. This makes me drop the rating for usability down to a 6, because for higher touch environments, I wouldn't recommend a Juniper. Outside of data center use cases, a Cisco switch would be a better option.
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.
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 preferred Juniper over Cisco for our WAN/Internet routing needs for a number of reasons. First was the price, the Juniper offering was much more competitive than Cisco's. Secondly, was feature set, Juniper's implementation of routing protocols, routing tables, and forwarding options are better thought-out than Cisco's (not to mention Juniper's longstanding use of commit/confirm/rollback features, which Cisco has only started to use recently, and only on some of their products).
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
