Cisco Routers vs. SD-WAN Concierge

Cisco Routers, particularly ASRs, are well suited at the edge or perimeter of your network topology since they're capable of aggregating large data and performing fast packet processing. To be even more specific, they are great at handling full internet BGP route tables and aggregating multiple WAN connections. Some scenarios where they may be less appropriate might be for much smaller sites running less critical services that may not need "state of the art" enterprise routers.

Incentivized

The underlying product (Velocloud) is not the issue, Windstream is. Anything this company touches turns to crap.

• Helps to separate routing information for different networks for different customers.
• Helps peers with service providers and Customer Networks and starts the exchange of information between them.
• Helps facilitate internet connectivity for enterprise networks.
• Helps transferring Internet or Private Data from one place to another.

Incentivized

• Failover is easy, no single point of failure, provided you have the bandwidth.

• It will be helpful if configuration can be done using a http GUI
• Graphical Visualizing provisioned VPN services will helps in troubleshooting
• Software upgrade process should have an automated way, that helps in managing large no of devices in the network

Incentivized

• While the product may work decently once implemented, Windstream is a constant roadblock.
• Trouble issues need to be escalated before people will bother to work on them.

We are extremely likely to renew, as we have been very happy with our Cisco Routers for over 10 years. Their uptime as well as stable nature makes them ideal for us, as we are an industry that cannot afford downtime. We trust our partner to recommend our next model Cisco, when the time comes.

Incentivized

The best thing about Cisco products is their presence in community. When you have a problem you can do quick search and find whoever else had the same question and expert answer for that question. Other thing is there are Cisco certified people we can find very easily if want some help with comissioning these products

Incentivized

Cisco support is very good. Of course, sometime you will run into support guy that isn't up to the task. Buf overall, the support system is well structure. You know if this support isn't able to help, you can esclate the situation to find another help. Also, their documentation is well developed and can be very useful.

Incentivized

Other vendors definitely bring some great features. We've gone from Fortinet to HPE, to Ruckus. Each product has benefits to consider. For us, Cisco is a trusted brand that's used about thousands of customers and many fortune companies. While some of the newer or smaller players have great features, Cisco has most of the same plus time in the trenches.

Incentivized

• Network management has become easy and fast with cloud based portal.
• Network policies could be rolled out quickly across the devices.
• Improvement in Network security.
• Stable internet connection has lead to less downtime and more productivity.
• Stable internet connection in each location within the organization.

Incentivized

• One outage on our main site cost over 500K in lost revenue for a day, Windstream was unapologetic for failing to set a QOS policy right during cutover.
• We needed to get a building re-wired to get the install at one location going. Windstream said, let us quote it... It took them 2 months to get us a quote that was 4x higher than a local provider. Thankfully, this didn't impact the deployment schedule.