Leaving Cisco Behind

I think it all started when I first got the job back in 1999.  I inherited a network in a sad state of affairs.  It was a mixture of mostly cheap equipment, pretty much a flat networks.  It had no-name hubs, small-name routers (2 points if you've ever heard of Engage Communication, they are still around), and maybe a switch or two, a 3Com and another off brand.  It ran a mix of Appletalk (about 200 Mac's) and IP.  A person printing a large document in the marketing department could practically take down the network for all other users.  On some days, connectivity to our remote sites would fail and the normal solution was to "reboot the router" (are you kidding me?).

I needed a layer 3 switching/routing solution that supported Appletalk and IP, and we were very interested in moving to VoIP in the near future.  When looking at the options available at the time, precious few layer 3 switching devices supported anything other than IP and IPX, and even less had PoE switches ready to market.  Cisco was one vendor which had all of that.  Sure I knew Appletalk was dying, but I knew it would take a years to get rid of it completely.  I could possibly live with a routed Appletalk solution with VLAN's, but the Cat 6500 could actually switch Appletalk so it seemed like a great solution, fully redundant, layer 3 switching in our core, and so we ponied up the cash.

It's been a great solution, in virtually continual operation since early 2000, however, that was a long time ago.  Appletalk was eventually weaned from our systems, and now, like everyone else, we're all IP all the time.  Cisco tells me my equipment will be EOL in a few months and I need to purchased something else.  Fine, 10 years is a good long life, even for expensive equipment.  They provide a quote, it's about 1/3 of what I paid a decade ago, and includes 1Gb links to desktops instead of 100Mb, but otherwise, it's about the same.  It's still a 6509 (although now a "6509-E", which must mean something).  Why would I want to swap our a 6509 for another 6509?  Is the "-E" supposed to make me feel like I'm getting something?  That's an expensive letter for sure.

So then I question why I would buy this 6509-E just because it's Cisco.  When we first went with Cisco it was great.  The equipment was expensive, and support was too, but it was top notch.  Things mostly worked great, and when they didn't, the support experience was excellent.  But this slowly declined over 10 years.  Recent purchases in wireless and WAAS have seemed to have more features broken than working (I'm sure that's not actually true, but it felt that way).  Multiple support calls took weeks, months, or in some cases YEARS to get resolution, and in some of those cases still there's still no fix.  Support costs have gone up and up, while the support response has gone down and down.  Why would I continue to use Cisco in this scenario?  It's fairly easy to justify a price premium for a solid product with excellent support, but not so easy for a mediocre product with poor (or in some cases virtually non-existent) support.

So why stay with Cisco without even looking?  Well, we contacted vendors from all over the place, Brocade (Foundry), Juniper, Force10, Extreme Networks, H3C, Enterasys.  We asked them to put together proposals to replace our aging Cisco gear.  It took a while, but they all eventually put together a quote, some with great proposals with excellent features, some that were pretty much just a match for what Cisco was selling, but all for less than Cisco.  In many cases MUCH less than Cisco.

We were most intrigued by the Brocade and Extreme Networks quotes.  Brocade hardware looks great, they have a Cisco looking CLI, and they put together a nice architecture that should be more failure-resistant that our previous Cisco setup (or the proposed new one) all while still beating Cisco's price.  Extreme really blows us away with it's pricing.  It's hard to believe all the features they can pack into their switch and still be easily the lowest cost all the vendors.

We haven't decided which way we'll go yet.  The downside to Exteme would be having to learn a new CLI (although they have a "Legacy CLI" mode to help with that burden), and of course the fact that they're a smaller company and it's hard to see exactly where, or even if, they fit in the future, long-term marketplace, but I suspect they'll at least get purchased by someone (maybe Qlogic)?

The only real downside to the Brocade quote seems to be that the solution does not cost that much less than the Cisco offering, although the equipment as designed is much more capable and resilient that what Cisco is offering right now.  They'll still save some money up front, and over the long haul their maintenance is quite a bit less than Cisco, so there should be long term savings as well.

Our network is simple, it's hard to believe that pretty much any of these vendors solutions wouldn't meet our needs well into the future, but yet I'm still nervous about replacing Cisco in our network?  Why is that?  We've swapped storage vendors three times in the same span, and server vendors twice and I didn't really worry about those.  Is anyone else in the same boat buying Cisco just because it's what you've always done?  Any experience with switching vendors other than Cisco?  Horror stories, etc?