ISP Failover with Cisco ASA
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
@Pete-S said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
All ASA 5500 series are EOL though so I don't think you can (or should) upgrade the license on them..
Those things are still rock solid though, and with the 5 figure prices on the newer series, plenty of businesser prefer not to upgrade
Except "rock solid" compared to a few hundred dollars for more modern, faster gear from non-Cisco. Support for an ASA costs more than just upgrading to a better product.
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@scottalanmiller said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
Except "rock solid" compared to a few hundred dollars for more modern, faster gear from non-Cisco. Support for an ASA costs more than just upgrading to a better product.
I'm not enough of a network specialist to go into the cisco vs $insertNameHere debate. But I've built several datacenters in the past decade, and the ones where there was NEVER any problem with the firewalls was the ones where the customer paid for the Cisco kit. The same goes for switches btw. Other have used meraki, ubiquiti, dell/sonicwall and even fortinets, there were always hardware problems after a while. The Cisco based DCs just kept working. They also cost much more, so it's really a matter of calculating the TCOs properly.
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
Other have used meraki
Meraki is actually a mid-level Cisco router. If you see problems on Meraki (and we all do), you are seeing Cisco issues. Cisco makes higher and lower level stuff under the Cisco brand. And a very specific range under the Cisco Meraki brand.
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
But I've built several datacenters in the past decade, and the ones where there was NEVER any problem with the firewalls was the ones where the customer paid for the Cisco kit.
I'd say we see it about equal to everything else that's decent. The biggest problem with it is the price and performance. It's terrible on both counts. And the cost is so bad that it causes support issues (you can simply pay for spare Ubiquiti gear cheaper than you can support Cisco gear) so you actually tend to get way better "support" from Ubiquiti for less money.
SonicWall is obviously garbage, that's a brand made just for resellers. So discount that. Beyond that, we see them all have issues, and all be decently solid when treated well. Cisco has a bit more of a reputation for quality of support people, but less of a reputation for performance. But as of late, Cisco's security posture has become a bit infamous and using them as a firewall is a bit... questionable.
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@scottalanmiller said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
Meraki is actually a mid-level Cisco router. If you see problems on Meraki (and we all do), you are seeing Cisco issues. Cisco makes higher and lower level stuff under the Cisco brand. And a very specific range under the Cisco Meraki brand.
There's a reason I say meraki (or linksys) and not cisco. Those may have been companies acquired by Cisco, but it's not the same tech, and I do not consider it real cisco
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@scottalanmiller I can only relate to my own experience with them, and while it's not as significant as my experience with server hw or opensource virt stuff, I've gone through several hundred units of various vendors over the years. My experience with cisco has always been good. My experience with Juniper was pretty much on par. The same goes for checkpoint. The rest... not so great.
When I do a consulting gig building a DC, I always try to balance budget oriented solutions with hardware that is not going to be problematic. So when the client can afford cisco, we take it. When not, well, we look for solutions.
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
There's a reason I say meraki (or linksys) and not cisco. Those may have been companies acquired by Cisco, but it's not the same tech, and I do not consider it real cisco
That's mostly true. But Cisco considers it real Cisco and it shows their view of themselves. And that, I always think, is important. Cisco doesn't seem themselves as an enterprise player. And I've been in sales meetings with Cisco and that definitely comes through when talking to them.
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
My experience with Juniper was pretty much on par. The same goes for checkpoint.
Much more limited on Juniper, but yes, always good.
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@dyasny said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
When I do a consulting gig building a DC, I always try to balance budget oriented solutions with hardware that is not going to be problematic. So when the client can afford cisco, we take it. When not, well, we look for solutions.
It's the brand we avoid most, for the same reason
Having been at two huge banks that were burned by being willing to use UCS, Cisco and enterprise are two words I never put together. From networking to phones to servers, Cisco is consistently overpriced and underperforming.
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@scottalanmiller said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:
That's mostly true. But Cisco considers it real Cisco and it shows their view of themselves. And that, I always think, is important. Cisco doesn't seem themselves as an enterprise player. And I've been in sales meetings with Cisco and that definitely comes through when talking to them.
That's not what I got from my sales conversations with them. They were very explicit about real Cisco and the lesser sub-brands.
Having been at two huge banks that were burned by being willing to use UCS, Cisco and enterprise are two words I never put together. From networking to phones to servers, Cisco is consistently overpriced and underperforming.
I absolutely loved UCS, even wrote the original oVirt/RHV plugin for the VMFEX cards. They were ahead of their time with those boxes, but the cloud pretty much killed everything really cool and advanced about HW
