Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.
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UniFi WiFi Access Points
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Ubiquiti Networks in San Jose provides the UniFi wi-fi access points. The enterprise products support 1,000+ client capacity, long-range 6 GHz performance, and 10 GbE PoE connectivity with native high availability architecture for critical enterprise environments.
If I were to compare the Catalyst to the Meraki, I do feel more secure about the Catalyst, as Meraki was not originally a cisco product and was acquired. So, from the point of security and dependability, the Catalyst is a winner.
I like Ubiquiti equipment a lot, they are more affordable than new Cisco, however, the old Cisco gear is so available and affordable it's hard to pass up. It has a great reseller market as well.
In comparison to the NETGEAR and Linksys, these are simple single VLAN switches that are not business capable. Cisco switches give you the ability to separate segments as well as true single-port speed, no sharing. In comparison to Aruba, Aruba just recently got into the PoE …
Cisco Catalyst Switches have offered better reliability, support and customization when compared to Ubiquiti networks. While Ubiquiti is cheaper, it required proprietary knowledge and training that was difficult to locate within the region. Engineers ended up having to get …
Ubiquiti is much more user friendly than the Cisco products we considered using, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Cisco is top of the line and one of, if not the industry standard. However, for a small church organization with minimal experienced staff when it comes to …
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 love the equipment for small-scale commercial solutions and quality without the price tag. I might not recommend their products for a large organization with multiple locations and servers. However, the GUI interface will allow remote access and setup across the network. I think this is a great solution for small businesses and families or home office solutions, provided there is some IT knowledge for setup and maintenance.
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.
Initial configuration of access points can be rather tricky. Each one I have installed was a complete pain to get setup and connected with the UniFi Controller software. I never worked out what causes me problems, but thankfully once I've stumbled through the correct procedure, it does work completely reliably after that, for years on end.
The UniFi Controller software will nag you to share usage data. When offered to opt-in, I choose not to do so, but you'll eventually be nagged again on a future login.
Some of the 'tooltips' within the Controller software could be more informative.
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.
Ubiquiti makes great Access points at various tiers provided far better coverage and throughput than consumer-grade wireless repeaters and routers. We have not had any performance complaints from guests or from the administration who use the wifi on a daily basis.
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.
Ubiquiti support is minimal, which is said to help decrease the cost of the equipment. However, with many reports of emails going directly to the Ubiquiti support line taking days to hear a response, you're better off either engaging with the community forums for help from fellow UniFi users or reaching out to a reseller that has training on the equipment that can assist.
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
Ubiquiti is overall easier to work with. There is no special training needed to accomplish many of the things required with a Cisco product. Since my time is stretched thin, I need something that I can manage without being weighed down by command-line communications. Also, I am able to use my wireless devices to maintain every Ubiquiti device on my network.
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
