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Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

johngm
NETGEAR Employee Retired

NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

 ****** Last week we completed the selection and confirmation of the folks for the Users Group meeting here in San Jose next month.   Thanks for all of your feedback and replies.  We appear to have an interesting international group to get into some deep discussions about how we can improve our commercial products here at NETGEAR.   I will be closing this thread to new replies and I will open another to include notes and highlights of the user forum after the event in mid-December.    John**************

 

 

 

 

Hello NETGEAR community,

 

I have a great offer to a limited number of lucky users of the Business Solutions community.   

 

On December 11th and 12th, NETGEAR will be hosting a small group of our business products customers for a users group meeting here in San Jose California.    Participants will spend the day on Monday the 12th providing us with feedback on current products, our services and customer experience, as well as future product concepts and our development roadmaps.  

 

It won't be all work though!

 

On Sunday, December 11th, NETGEAR will host you in a suite at the brand new Levi Stadium to watch the San Francisco 49ers battle the New York Jets.   During your several days in the San Jose area the NETGEAR team will be hosting you for meals, tours and other fun events as well.   Of course, throughout your stay you will be mixing with the business and technical leaders of the Commercial products business unit here at NETGEAR.   

 

How do I sign up?

 

In the next several weeks we will be selecting a dozen or so individuals to join us for this event.   The easiest way to get considered for selection is to respond to this post with a short reply explaining which NETGEAR commercial products you own and what you love about your products and customer experience with NETGEAR ... and ... as the case may be, what you hate about your NETGEAR products and customer experience.  We are not just looking for sycophants we want critical thinkers who care enough to see our strengths and weaknesses.   We will use your community logon information to contact you if your entry is selected.  

 

Of course you can't be a NETGEAR employee, close family member, contractor, etc...and you have to be able to travel to San Jose on the 10th (Saturday before the game) and stay through Tuesday morning the 13th.   We will be providing travel arrangement for roundtrip coach airfare, single room accomodation for the 10th, 11th, and 12th, transportation and meals while you are here in San Jose.  

 

The final selection will be made over the next several weeks based on the number and quality of the responses we get.   I will update this post with a notice when we have the final list, until then submissions will be actively considered.   Of course, we will make sure to post photos and some of the highlights of the event here in the community and this won't be the last of these events...stay tuned.   

 

I am looking forward to your posts and hope to meet you in person.

 

John

Message 1 of 17
chitreshgupta
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Netgear products have really nice white color and great looks. These are easy to setup and use. The bad part is that their availability in India is not good as only limited products with low price tags are readily available. Many products like Giga Switches with High Power budget PoE are not available at all.

This has restricted Netgear as a Home & Small Office products brand in India. 

Message 2 of 17
kevinfor2014
Guide

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

We have been using several of the ReadyNas Products (RN716X EDA500 Readynas PRO Business edition etc) 

The great thing about X-RAID2 is that we can increase NAS Storage size just by installing larger hard drive - instead of reformatting that's required with standard RAID-5 we can also "bond" the two 10GB (10GBase-T) Ethernet ports together on the RN716X to really increase throughput  - I really wish Netgear offered the same ability to get insight into your data that other NAS  companies like: Qumulo (dot) com offer with " Data-Aware Scale out NAS" Solutions - see site for details 

 

We also own Several 10GB Switches (708E, 708T 712T)  the newer 708T has many more features like LACP 802.3ad  that the older 708E Switch doesn't support and  with better user interface and Netgear is really the only "lower priced" entry into the 10GBase-T Market - the earlier version 16 port models 712T tends to be very loud..  a larger fan, slower RPM design in the future might be helpful to make it less loud.

 

areas for improvement ...  

 

we had a missional critical Potential data loss situation happen on the Readynas... that required escalation to Level-3 the support contract was expensive.. took about 12 Days but the Support person was able to remote into the Readynas & fix the problem so we could finally access our data again...  level 1/2 could use improved training..  The Business Security need improvement compared to many other competitors (Cisco Watchguard etc) on the Wireless end we all talk about 802.11AC Wave-2  80/160mhz channels with 3x3 or even 4x4 MU-Mimo at speeds up to 1733Mbps - but the reality is that Netgear does NOT make any 802.11AC Wave-2 MU-MIMO Adapters that support this speed... it's all 80Mhz 2x2 866.7Mbps SU-MIMO - so why should you buy any Netgear Wireless solution above R7000 Model? does Netgear make any 802.11AC 160Mhz Adapter  that takes advantage of the new X10 R9000 speeds?  What about an 802.11AD fuctions - how can you actually use it - if Netgears doesn't make an 802.11AD USB adapter for your laptop?    

 

Message 3 of 17
NickNak
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

ReadyData 5200's as primary storage and replication targets, ReadyNAS 3200 as backup target. Use GS728TP and FS728TPv2 to carry data and voice. Biggest bind is the switch GUI which often seems quite clunky, and limited compared to brands we I used before (Cisco / HP) where we had CLI access. Get that there is a price to pay for big brands, but inexpensive should not mean difficult to use.

Having to use switch GUI to do simple things like modify VLAN with the current interface can be a real chore. Many occasions where browser just hangs, or does not refresh, so you are left wondering if the change was applied. There is a lot to be said for CLI (sh int, sh vlan, sh cdp ne de) would give most folk what they need without the browser overhead.

 

 

Model: RD5200|ReadyDATA 5200 Enterprise Storage
Message 4 of 17
ReallyReallyIdk
Initiate

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

I'm a tech for a ISP Dsl Fiber Internet connections, I try to use netgear routers for all our customers simply because of simplicity. I can walk a customer through making a desired change in seconds over the phone.

The issues that come with the simplicity aren't always simple although most are lately we have been getting weird issues where the routers won't log online after the new firmware update was installed unless the default MAC address is changed. The issue seems to be more and more frequent and we use allot of netgears so I hope it's simple to resolve we just haven't figured it out yet.

But overall I think that the netgear lineup is the best on the market and recommend customers with larger houses or multiple gamers to look at the Nighthawks and so far everyone I recommended has bought one and has nothing but good feedback.
Message 5 of 17
Noho
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Hi John et al,

 

I've used Netgear...gear 🙂 for a long time and recently chose the R6400 after tons of research to upgrade our outdated wifi system. The best part that I have found Netgear to be developing is the community. Clearly none of our businesses would be where they are without our customers, guests, clients etc. So while I appreciate the robust and solid products that I buy from Netgear, it's the support and community building that I see is happening all the time.  That being said, the equipment, like this new router, has all the best advanced features for a reasonable price. For price to performance ratio, it was exactly what we needed. Platform agnostic? Check! Dual bands and beamforming with gigabit ethernet means all our devices will be approaching the best speeds our ISP can serve up. Check! Having iTunes server functionality was just a cherry on top. My only complaint would be that I'd like this model we're currently running to have replaceable antennas, in case we were needing to add longer range third party antennas. Obviously there's other solutions for the same fix but just a thought. All the other customizeability is great.

 

Thanks for the chance to come and see where the heart of Netgear is and meet the people behind the brand. 

 

All the best,

Noho

Model: R6400|AC1750 Smart WiFi Router
Message 6 of 17
Rajshah
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

I have been using this wnr2000 and wnr2000v5 as repeter for past 6-8 yrs. without any problem and now it's freez-up, lossing wi-fi signal and reseting itself, and sometime turn itself off. It's been easy to work and setup the router and now just because of it upgrade to NETGEAR AC1200 Dual Band WI-Fi Router.

Netgear Genie is easy to manage the router, this way it will take the load off from your customer service dept.

I have been very pleased with your product. Just make them as affordable so the low income family can have wifi in their home.

 

 

 

Model: WNR2000|Wireless-N Router,WNR2000v5|N300 WiFi Router
Message 7 of 17
Charles_gulotta
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

R7900 router
Message 8 of 17
NickNak
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Your commant about the support being expensive, and it taking 12 days to get a problem fixed is worrying when you have put your trust in a vendor. Hardware is just a bunch of tin. It is how it is supported that makes it good tin.

 

I have over the weekend had direct experiance of the lack of support. Went to do the upadate from 1.4.3 to 1.4.4 of the storage (5000's and the 512's). First one of each went fine, so based on that set the others off. Ended up not being able to contact two of the devices after the reboot, and the GUI just says "lost contact, DO NOT REBOOT, call Tech Support". Well that would have been great, but all the published UK numbers were not answering (Saturday 20:00pm), or telling me office opening hours. How is that support when you can't contact them ?

 

After a long drive to head office, much coffee, a bit of thinking I worked out that the ones not contactable were connected with additional addresses (vnic0, vnic1) where vnic1 was the primary address on the local network, rather than vnic0 being the primary. Once I figured that out I could then get to the lost devices over the other interface and get them back online with a second reboot. So now all back up and running. As a fix I will reorder the vnic's in next maintenance window.

 

But now I am left nervous, and that is not a good way to feel about something critical to the business. There should be more information available, and better online resources to finding solutions when we have issues. This in the end was a very simple thing, If the online resource has the answer then we can live without phoning, so Netgear saves resources, and we can find answers.

Model: RD5200v1|ReadyDATA 5200 Enterprise Storage,RDD516|ReadyDATA 516 Diskless Chassis
Message 9 of 17
StephenB
Guru

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

I work from home, so I am both a home prosumer and SOHO.  I have quite a bit of Netgear equipment deployed (some of which comes from Netgear's beta program, some of which is purchased).

 

My home and home office are wired for ethernet, and the network is powered by a GS724Tv3 switch. I am using both LACP and VLANs on this switch (the VLANs are used to segment my office and home networks). An R8500 router serves as my main router, also providing whole-house WiFi coverage and OpenVPN for remote access.  There are two smaller Netgear smart switches integrated into the network also -  a GS108T on the second floor to provide VLAN trunking for the R8500, and a GS510TP in my home office to provide PoE.    

 

I have several ReadyNAS - the main NAS currently being a Pro-6, the others are smaller NAS used for backup.  The various NAS cover three generations of ReadyNAS - Sparc-based, X86 OS 4.2, OS 6 NAS.  Work in progress is evaluating and deploying an RN526X+ XS708E switch, which together should make a nice upgrade for my aging Pro-6.

 

Strategically, I think the biggest challenge for Netgear remains building out a reliable cloud offering that is well integrated with its products. I see Netgear as better at providing point products than solutions.  There are some more tactical challenges too - access to support and ReadyNAS firmware rollouts.

 

If you are interested in feedback from someone who is tech-savvy but not an IT professional, then I might be able to help.

Message 10 of 17
steveoelliott
Luminary

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Well... I've been a home / business user of ReadyNAS products since 2008... Having owned and deployed numerous NV+ and Pro 6 units for friends, family and small businesses.

 

I ordered a brand new 526X on Friday and am eagerly awaiting the delivery!

 

I have always been impressed with the reliability and for this reason have continued using and recommending these products. Netgear generally represent a good balance between quality, features and value for money. This is critical for SMB's.

 

I do feel there is room for improvement in the area of professional support services. I have on a couple of occasions needed urgent access to support following catastrophic outages (due to software bugs) and needed live expert support immediately to resolve a business impacting issue. Having a dead / inaccessible server is frightening. However, it has often taken days to get expert engagement and a fix provided. I understand there are pro support offerings and I would consider one of these. However, they are not in my opinion well documented / advertised. I think almost every business would purchase one if offered at a reasonable cost.

 

In terms of features, I have already posted an idea suggesting the feature of a domain controller. This would mean many SMB's no longer need Microsoft based servers, not only reducing their hardware costs but also the ongoing support expenses. A domain controller feature would also be so easy to implement as the feature already exists within Samba. It is literally one line in the configuration.

 

As an IT professional with many years experience with customers from SMB's to service providers, I have a wealth of commercial experience and exposure. My background is primarily in the area of data communications. However, I have been approached by many friends / SMB's to build and deploy inexpensive and reliable data storage solutions.  One of the major benefits of deploying a ReadyNAS solution is that you don't need your own in house IT professional to run it. They can essentially be configured and then left alone.

Message 11 of 17
Theshoffer
Aspirant

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Nighthawk ac3200 user.I like the extensive functionality, parental controls and organized interface to manage.
There needs to be a way to secure the reset switch...or at least develop an option. - physical key to lock it or key fob rfid? Maybe? I have a 16 year old that refuses to manage his game playing and no amount of restriction can prevent a kid from hitting reset and getting online at 1am to continue gaming.
Message 12 of 17
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum


@kevinfor2014 wrote:

 

We also own Several 10GB Switches (708E, 708T 712T)  the newer 708T has many more features like LACP 802.3ad  that the older 708E Switch doesn't support and  with better user interface and Netgear is really the only "lower priced" entry into the 10GBase-T Market - the earlier version 16 port models 712T tends to be very loud..  a larger fan, slower RPM design in the future might be helpful to make it less loud.

 

Thanks for your feedback. NETGEAR ships more than 80% of the web-managed 10Gbps switches in the world.

 

We're passionate about bring advanced technology to our customers in easy-to-use form factors and at affordable prices. Our company was founded 20 years ago on this vision.

Feedback from our customers is vital for helping us to shape our plans for the future.


@kevinfor2014 wrote:

we can also "bond" the two 10GB (10GBase-T) Ethernet ports together on the RN716X to really increase throughput  


We've recently added the RN526X and RN626X to our range and these have two 10GBASE-T ports. These are much more affordable than the RN716X was. We're excited to be bringing increased performance to more of our customers.

 

10G is a big step un in performance over gigabit.

@kevinfor2014 wrote:

 

we had a missional critical Potential data loss situation happen on the Readynas... that required escalation to Level-3 the support contract was expensive.. took about 12 Days but the Support person was able to remote into the Readynas & fix the problem so we could finally access our data again...

Can you let me know the case number so I can review what happened there? It sounds like you must have run into a complex data recovery situation.

 

Businesses that spend e.g. tens of thousands of dollars on servers still backup their data. They might find they never need to use the backup, but they backup their data just in case they run into a rare situation in which it might be needed. If the NAS stores the primary copy of your data it also should be backed up regularly.

 

When you consider the cost of data recovery and the time it can take (downtime does have a cost for your business even if it's hard to determine precisely what that cost is) and that it can be unsuccessful it really is important to backup. See e.g. Preventing Catastrophic Data Loss

This is why we've spent so much time providing a range of backup options (see ReadyNAS Backup FAQ) the latest of which is ReadyDR.

Message 13 of 17
RichardJo
NETGEAR Expert

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Hi Chitresh,

I can help you out hopefully by forwarding your requests to our sales offices in India. Where are you based and what products are you looking for?

thanks,

Richard Jonker

VP Product Line Management, SMB 

Message 14 of 17
RichardJo
NETGEAR Expert

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

Hi Kevinfor2014,

I will take a look at Qumolo. Great to read you are getting the maximum out of RN716X by bonding the two 10gbe ethernet adapters. Have you seen the new RN526X and RN626X? We got throughputs around 16gbits per second with using 2 bonded 10gbe copper NICs.

 

We are aware of the need for less noisy fans on 10gbit switches; many of our customers use these in a desktop environment rather than in a rack. We need those fans to keep the temperature range optimal. With chipsets evolving you will see designs improve over time.

 

Our wireless LAN accesspoints continue to improve with the fast adoption of wave 2 802.11AC tech; the new WAC740 operates with Multi-User MIMO and can achieve speeds up to 600 Mbps for 2.4 GHz and 1.7 Gbps for 5 GHz. You would need optimized clients (laptops, tablets, phones) to get the maximum out of it. And a 2.5gbit PoE switch to feed it of course, which we would be happy to sell to you (M4200).

 

We are continuously looking at ways to improve the ease of use of our products. Client side wireless dongles have been part of our portfolio for years. We always look at rolling new technology into our portfolios. For 802.11AD the consumer use case is currently wireless media offloading from AD-compatible mobile clients.

 

Richard Jonker

VP Product Line Management, SMB

 

Message 15 of 17
RichardJo
NETGEAR Expert

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

I am curious how this ended, would you please let me know what was the root cause and the solution? If you have a case number pls add.

Thanks

Richard Jonker

VP product line management

Message 16 of 17
kevinfor2014
Guide

Re: NETGEAR Business Solutions users forum

the case has been resolved.. I'll direct message you with the case# for your reference... 

Message 17 of 17
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