I’ve been a fan of Cisco for 2 decades. Not only because I teach the CCNA back then, but because I like everything about Cisco product. The OS, the quality of the product, performance and documentation provides online by cisco. Even the color !
Cisco was my first choice as an IT consultant when I have to propose a solution. Most of the company I work with as a consultant was very small. 50 employees or less. This makes it an expensive solution to sell to the customer. Very few have the budget to purchase Cisco equipment.
Because you never know about the customer budget, I always present 3 solutions. One with a very economical product, a middle price one and a high-end solution. No need to say that Cisco was always in the High end because their product isn’t cheap to buy.
Proposing Cisco equipment result in mixed emotion. I know that the OS isn’t a every kids on the block toy. I know that once my customer gets Cisco equipment, I wouldn’t have to compete with newbie tech that cut cost and that it wouldn’t be anybody playing with the config ending with full of surprise to support the customer. But at the same time, their equipment was so reliable (that is before the Intel flaw in the ASA) that I know customers wouldn’t call me. They would be no income out of support to reconfigure, find out why it’s failing once in a while or simply to replace the piece of s*it. In a word, no income or very little from technical support once it is properly configured.
And let me tell you something, when you are a small IT consultant, as with most of the top brand, you don’t make a living with the ridiculous markup you make out of selling Cisco equipment.
Like many product I sell, if I can, I’m also using it at home to work with it on a regular basis. Be second hand, but it is a good way to evaluate the reliability and to support a product. This also means paying high price for SOHO equipment. But what can I say, those products were contributing in my bread and butter, so I painfully pay the expensive price and happily goes on.
This all changes lately. There has always been laws with Cisco products that make it impossible to recycle and make the cost of refurbishing for second hand not worth it. If their product can meet the most demanding load in a network, it always been at a high price that most SOHO just can’t afford. Beginning around 2010, Cisco starts to tighten access to OS security update. I understand there are probably complex issues at play to protect their R&D but this was already a huge repellant to keep proposing and supporting their product. Still was my product of choice.
The “no no”, things I would never do was to sell the home product because of the cheap cost. One of them was Linksys. It was a ‘normal’ thing to reboot a Linksys router/Wifi product. And I’m not even talking about the many security flaw in this product line. I hate the “HOME” line of products to a point I would never have one at home. I prefer to pay high price then getting junk I can’t trust. This hasn’t changed when Cisco acquires Linksys. It’s around the same time Cisco start to block access to their web portal where you could find an example of the configuration of the real Cisco brand product (pre-Linksys). Both have the same effect on me: the Linksys as Cisco products and the block of info that was previously available on their web site. It feels like a cold shower.
After a few years of Linksys being ‘reengineer’/integrated by Cisco, I decide to give a try to the Small Business product line they make out of it. I purchase and play with a few switches/router in the SRW or SG Series/line. For many reasons, before and after, I highly ate those products and working with it didn’t help it at all. I wouldn’t place one of this product at a customer site.
With the SOHO internet connection being faster and faster, 100 Mb/s is becoming quite common in North America (and way faster in EU), my ASA-5505 was a little on the limit to my taste. But worst, since it is a security equipment, keeping it update after the end of Cisco support was totally out of the budget. Being a Cisco & HPE partner for many years, I decide to look out at competition to re-evaluate if having Cisco ASA was a winner’s choice.
This being said, 2 decades ago while I was teaching, I was telling my students that very few of them would earn very well their life with Linux products as Microsoft Windows was the OS of the enterprise. Not that I was against Linux or being a pro-Microsoft, as a teacher I want to be as neutral as possible (if it really exists!). I did learn Red Hat at this time, but I feel they were a little more stretch to do before it becomes a mature product worth of being used in a commercial and production environment without involving highly qualify and very hard to find technicians.
Starting 2020, I begin evaluating many flavours of Linux and I did test a lot of them. Thanks to today hypervisor and virtual machine. As now I’m slowly moving out of Cisco ASA equipment. My own SOHO Firewall is not a Cisco anymore and it will take a lot for me to go back to Cisco ASA. I’m not saying Cisco ASA is a bad product, but some Linux product totally surpasses Linksys and the best part is that they are working on an old piece of hardware that Cisco would have set EOL a very long time ago.
Bye, bye, Cisco ASA, hope I won’t see you anytime soon.
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