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Ruckus ICX Switches Rock
January 08, 2019

Ruckus ICX Switches Rock

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ruckus ICX Switches (formerly Brocade ICX Switches)

We use Ruckus ICX switches in a managed environment for VLANs. We have a VMware environment, and use the hosts to the SAN through the ICX switches 10GB ports. The 1GB ports connect through to our F5 load balancers and from there to our Cisco firewalls. We created VLANs for the host to SAN connections to direct traffic specifically between them. We set up management ports to manage via the GUI. Although the CLI is what I use primarily, it's nice to see the GUI for stats when I am watching other parts or that network. Otherwise, I use unused ports for hooking unmanaged equipment into my network.
  • VLANs are easily set up, via the GUI or Command line interface.
  • The 10 GB ports work flawlessly.
  • The commands are easy enough to learn.
  • Licensing for the 10GB ports is a bit pricey, but that was 5 years ago, so things may have changed
  • The CLI commands are slightly different than typical Cisco commands
  • Their rack mounting was not the prettiest in the world
  • These switches are very good in the virtual environment. We have a highly reliable network in part because of these switches
  • The high uptime allows the business to offer reliable always-on connectivity to our clients
  • Speeds are fantastic, especially in a big data environment where speed is crucial to our remote client base
Creating VLANs for Vmware (or any virtualized environment) is exactly what these are meant for. You need this type of equipment in those environments to function. We are a production 24/7 environment, and the reliability and service (speed, low error rate) make these switches ideal for this environment. If you don't need a managed switch environment, like an internal network with minimal security where no separation of LAN is needed, you don't need these. BUT looking back on previous work environments I was in, with older technology where we didn't have these types of switches, since using them I see places we could have improved network performance and had security that was not available without managed switches where we could segregate work processes