The Cisco Small Business RV Series provides SMBs with connectivity, VPN for remote employees, and other features.
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Juniper EX Series Switches
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Juniper Networks offers the EX Series Ethernet switches, as cloud-grade switches designed for the converged enterprise branch, campus, and data center, and for service providers. They address growing enterprise demands for high availability, unified communications, and virtualization.
It's best suited for small offices 10-25 users. Any more and its best to move away to a more higher tier. It will be less appropriate for a mid level company with a large staff. It's best for a small business with a limited budget and less strenuous security functionality.
They work great as core switches, data center switches, top of rack switches. They can even serve as routers, their routing capability is great, except for where you need lots of routing processing power. I would not use many of them for branch office switches though, due to noise and slowness of bootup
The Juniper EX Series Switches are very easy to configure and quick to deploy. The ability to make changes and troubleshoot issues is top-rated. I have never had trouble contacting support. They also have many knowledge articles on use. Always adding new features to the Juniper Mist Dashboard for easy visibility into your network
The features are good. The support is good. The resources to deploy, manage, and operate it are good. Customer's feedback and testimonials are good. The updates in terms of zero day vulnerabilities are good and timely. But, I still give an 8 out of 10 because I think the pricing, licensing, and GUI can be improved more.
Many times when contacting Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support, it seems that it is easiest for support to recommend a straight replacement (RMA) instead of taking time to walk through a solution on the faulty system. We find we get better help from a third-party consulting firm that has Juniper certified technicians or professionals on staff. They take the time to explain processes and workflow, which Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches support seems to shy away from.
Cisco's power really stems from its brand reputation and honestly not much else. No one ever got fired for deploying Cisco, and that's why it stands out. The Cisco Small Business RV Series is no exception there; the unit is built well and does the job. However, much more powerful alternatives for routers are out there—the biggest competitor being Ubiquiti. The UniFi routers are significantly more powerful in all regards, including routing speed, IPS/IDS speeds, and VPN functionality. Support for those is admittedly rather lackluster though, so if your network is critical, you are effectively self-insuring your equipment. For some that may be fine, but for others, that risk of extended downtime is just not worth it.
The rollback, commit and confirm are the biggest players in the game. Juniper is the only one who has those features, so I believe they have a leg up in the game. The CLI is one of the easiest to work with.
From a user's point of view, the ease of configuration and management has been incredible. Much less time is spent maintaining Juniper than previous solutions.
From a reseller's point of a view, Juniper is excellent. They treat small partners like us very well even if our volume is not huge. Juniper switches are part of our standard solution that has been great for our customers.
