Cisco Router Alternatives

imsuchageek

imsuchageek

Weaksauce
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Jan 5, 2006
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I'm looking for some "enterprise" grade alternatives to cisco / juniper routers. I've looked into vyetta, but its not much cheaper than cisco gear IMO. Anyone have some insight?

Thanks
 
What are you trying to accomplish? Routing, Firewall, VPN, What?


There is a few options, but depending on what you need to accomplish
 
Watchguard, Checkpoint would be two firewalls to look at if that is what you need
 
I have some customers that don't have the money to spend on the good stuff.

one needs basic routing, with bgp. the other needs a good firewall solutions for a /25 block that needs protected.
 
I think i would like to explore options that can be ran as a VM, for now. I should have mentioned that off the bat... :)
 
imsuchageek said:
I have some customers that don't have the money to spend on the good stuff.

one needs basic routing, with bgp. the other needs a good firewall solutions for a /25 block that needs protected.
Click to expand...

These wouldn't be enterprise customers them.

For routers, check out Mikrotik/RouterOS. I wouldn't use it in an enterprise, but they make solid stuff and the feature support it really great.

For firewalls, I don't think you can beat the bang for buck you get out of Cisco ASAs or Juniper's SRX. You could check out FortiNet as well. I wouldn't touch a Sonicwall or Watchguard for a production environment. Checkpoint, Palo Alto, etc are typically more expensive than Cisco or Juniper.
 
Vito_Corleone said:
These wouldn't be enterprise customers them.

For routers, check out Mikrotik/RouterOS. I wouldn't use it in an enterprise, but they make solid stuff and the feature support it really great.

For firewalls, I don't think you can beat the bang for buck you get out of Cisco ASAs or Juniper's SRX. You could check out FortiNet as well. I wouldn't touch a Sonicwall or Watchguard for a production environment. Checkpoint, Palo Alto, etc are typically more expensive than Cisco or Juniper.
Click to expand...

I would have to agree on the Mikrotik/RouterOS one. It has a lot of the features that Cisco has for a small fraction of the price.
 
stay away from Checkpoint... blerg is about all I have to say about them... way overpriced, clunky management, hideous tech support, crummy documentation, etc
 
mattjw916 said:
stay away from Checkpoint... blerg is about all I have to say about them... way overpriced, clunky management, hideous tech support, crummy documentation, etc
Click to expand...

Ugh, we use their encryption blades and I HATE THEM. Clunky is one way to describe them.
 
Well the killer here is bgp, not many of the UTM appliances support BGP outright. In enterprise I would only suggest cisco/juniper, but if budget was an issue I'd reccomend vyatta. Those are the only solutions I personally know of that have good BGP implementation. Now if you want to roll whitebox hardware that opens somethings up, PFSense or Vyatta on whitebox hardware make a very good alternative to cisco/juniper for BGP. Grab a nice supermico box slap some quad port intel PCIe nics and your golden.
 
We jsut set up a crazy client with Aruba networks stuff. Granted they are a wireless firm but have a very good offering in enterprise level switching. IMHO Cisco and Juniper are better at cores and routing, but if Wifi is a goal - they win hands down.
 
you really want to run a VM router for an "enterprise" setup? sounds like you're setting yourself up for failure.

another alternative is Brocade. They are known for their SAN switches, but they also have some nice ethernet offerings as well, since purchasing Foundry.
 
Maybe he wants a VM for testing first? I doubt anyone would run a firewall VM in production.
 
Eickst said:
So they need BGP but they aren't an enterprise?
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BGP != enterprise. Especially if it's on the WAN side. BGP is very common with MPLS WANs, which are used by businesses of all sizes.

Real enterprises may be cheap, but they're not going to run Vyatta or PFSense or any other router/firewall distro in place of Cisco/Juniper/Checkpoint/etc, at least not anywhere near a critical point in their network.
 
Vito_Corleone said:
BGP != enterprise. Especially if it's on the WAN side. BGP is very common with MPLS WANs, which are used by businesses of all sizes.
Click to expand...

This is true. We are 100 employees over 2 sites. We have an MPLS connection with our provider that uses BGP. We have Cisco routers at each site. We also looked at Juniper. We didn't even bother to look else where given the readily available documention from cisco / juniper.


Edit:

Also there are more people out there that work with Cisco, Juniper, etc on a regular basis than some other off solution
 
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What is your budget? how has that not been asked already? How much throughput do you need, jsut routing, or do you need firewall/IDS/IPS/VPN?
 
Berg0 said:
What is your budget? how has that not been asked already? How much throughput do you need, jsut routing, or do you need firewall/IDS/IPS/VPN?
Click to expand...

Your 24 posts too late.. Dropped the ball on that one.. LOL
 
calvinj said:
Your 24 posts too late.. Dropped the ball on that one.. LOL
Click to expand...

no one has mentioned money, which is probably the single most important factor. He states "less than cisco and juniper", so, less than a Cisco 881? or less than a 7204VXR with an NPE G2? both support BGP...
 
I'm going to guess that they need BGP and want to spend less than $200. Just a guess.
 
Vito_Corleone said:
BGP != enterprise. Especially if it's on the WAN side. BGP is very common with MPLS WANs, which are used by businesses of all sizes.

Real enterprises may be cheap, but they're not going to run Vyatta or PFSense or any other router/firewall distro in place of Cisco/Juniper/Checkpoint/etc, at least not anywhere near a critical point in their network.
Click to expand...

Just gonna quote this to reiterate. Routers and Firewalls are serious business in the enterprise.



What's the price range?
(As someone mentioned, less than cisco or juniper doesn't tell us much)


I'm sure there are tons of options, but if the driving force is "less than cisco or juniper" they either don't care or haven't been talking to the right partner.
 
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