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.
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MikroTik Routers and Switches
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Latvian company MikroTik offers routers and switches.
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
MikroTik is suited for large companies that require advanced distributions in terms of contracted bandwidth, and in the same way, allows a single device to specify filtering and firewall rules without acquiring an additional device. There is a range for small companies which is more economical and less robust, but in case it's not necessary, such a strict control over the data consumption of the company is not a feasible solution.
Some of the wiki articles have not been updated or are not accurate enough. We spent a couple of days trying to find an example of implementing a mobile IPSec client solution. But once this has been implemented, it has been solid (always worked). A bigger community would help, and I am finding it hard to find the time to contribute to these articles.
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
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.
There is no SOC, NOC, where you can contact to try to resolve any difficulties. The problems that these devices have are solved largely through the community, with workaround alternatives, or if the support team responds to a request, the response times are too high for the current needs of technological communications.
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.
Cisco Routers are one of the best in the market, however they are also very expensive and not suitable for a small deployment or any deployment which requires just a couple of routers. MikroTik on the other hand are less expensive and provides many features that you require for a small scale deployment. they fit in with the budget and do what you need them to.
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.
