Item: Cisco Routers
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Routers

Cisco Routers Product Series

Cisco ISR 4000 Series

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Routers are used to support and route the workloads of our entire datacenter, routing terabytes of data weekly. Due to the rebust nature of the appliances, Cisco Routers are know for their uptime and powerful routing capabilities. Cisco stands behind their products and has some of the best support in the industry.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Reliability
Workload
Sized to match what you need
Performant

Cons

Cost
Complexity
Staff expertise

Return on Investment

Uptime
Integration with other systems
Comprehensive security features

Cisco Product Compatibility

Many companies often buy one vendor to fit all their network needs. The thought is, if we have Juniper for everything, won't we have an issue if we move to a Cisco Router? No. You won't have issues. It is correct though, that many vendors, including Cisco, want to be the provider for the whole stack. Many times that's nice and exactly what you want to do. Sure, because we are talking about routers, this will work in any network. But come on, there are benefits to that. The stack will play together nicely and you get many more features.

Cisco Router Security

Sometimes one can get overwhelmed with how many layers of the security onion are implemented. Routers are firewalls and firewalls are routers. They are specialized equipment though. You want to make sure your layers are in place. We have put basic things in place like hardening. Also, Cisco touts very impressive controls around the supply-chain. That is extremely important.

Cisco Router Access

I have only ever had one problem, no, two problems with Cisco Routers. One was the fault of the ISP overloading the RAM with BGP routes from hell. The other problem was due to temperature. Cisco makes solid products. They are trustworthy products to the enterprise can rely on to always access the applications that are important to the business.

Alternatives Considered

Ruckus ICX Switches, Fortinet FortiGate and Juniper Session Smart Router

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Routers delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Routers's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Routers live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Routers go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Routers again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, LogRocket, Zoom Phone, Cisco UCS Manager, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Routers come in a number of different configurations. They make routers for light workloads as well as maxed out beasts for highly available enterprise workloads. A lot of what you see from Cisco Routers is good. They are highly capable routing devices. Any enterprise network will benefit from using them in their backbone. Also do great as voice routers for those of us who still have on-prem phone systems.

Where things can be less appropriate is where you don't have an SME or a trusted MSP to take care of the maintenance and troubleshooting. You can't just turn it on and hope for the best. There are too many security threats regardless of the product vendor. You must maintain your equipment.

Comments

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Route me baby!