Thinking of going NetGear Business switches for our access switches
So I've been in environments with enterprise switches (Cisco, HP ProCurve, Brocade) where I've seen layer 3 switches, a Catalyst 6500 even, run as simple layer 2 switches (VLANs only). Personally, I prefer the Google model of using low cost hardware that does the job and building reliability into the system. In this case dual uplinks to dual enterprise core switches and spares on hand.
We're do for a switch refresh on 50+ Cisco access switches and NetGear appears to offer all of the features we need as far as layer 2 (and then some) at 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost compared to the big brands. All with included lifetime warranty, support, and software.
Are there any compelling reasons to stick with a big name for such basic switching and network connectivity? I would also be interested in any Redditors' experiences with NetGear's business managed switches. I'm looking at the M4100-24G-POE+ and M4100-50G-POE+ switches.
Re: Thinking of going NetGear Business switches for our access switches
Well, you are a in a vendor forum so there is a certain bias, nonetheless. 🙂 I'll try to share some of my experiences (~ 10 M4300 Switches, previously M4100 and others, education).
It really depends on who you have on staff (knowledge), who your partners are (including their knowledge) what your networks need to do (can it accept some downtime) and how much hand-holdig you need from a vendor. Also there are some things where I feel that Netgear does reach its limits and where in some departments you can actually be better off with one of those other brands.
Support: 24/7 OnCall is not included even with Netgear managed switches, you need to get ProSupport (no experience with them). However I've worked with Netgear's regular business support for i.e. bugs affecting stacking, and also hardware defects. Not many cases, but I was always positively surprised by how (quickly) they handled issues considering the price difference to those other vendors. Within europe I did get quick replacements (in advance to sending the defective unit in) and was fairly straightforward. The speed for replacement was one reason to stick with M4300 when we upgraded from M4100 (also while almost doubling the needed port count) while reconsidering our vendor choice then (there was one compelling one but their warranty service had bad track of record back then).
Also: If you require very early announced EoL dates like 3-5y, this is also only someone like Cisco does. However you can replace Netgear for less money within that time all while keeping cold spares and still saving money.
Knowhow: You are more likely to find Cisco certified engineers and network consulting companies in the wild than there are ones who are very familiar with Netgear managed switches. There is always someone to blame, so it depends on you and your management if you are alright with that. However if you have network engineers familiar with one of those named vendors, they will get their head around the CLI pretty easily. Yet some network engineers will raise their eyebrows when seeing Netgear instead of Cisco written on the box.
Fancy features / Hardware limits: There is no such thing as fancy API integration for programmability neither on M4300 or M4100. You have Web, CLI and SNMP they are usually robust in the managed switch range. Also there are less pre-made monitoring integrations floating around. The chance to find a basic monitoring Plugin for let's say Nagios is lower than with Cisco or HPE.
Netgear focuses on the SMB and ProAV market, not the very high end and datacenter market. While 25/50/100G just now became available with the M4500 (but definitely playing in another price range than the M4100) their main focus is in 1/10G and some 40G (M4300-96X). If you have a large requirement for higher speed ports, Netgear might not be a good fit. All in all: Check your actual requirements.
Other vendors will ask for an arm and a leg to get the largest PoE PSU option, not so with Netgear IMO. Netgear does sell its own optics, but for now there is no such thing as EEPROM validation. So long as the modules are MSA compliant, third party modules will usually work. You can also keep some spares if one fails (both PSU and optics) at the given price point.
At that point I'd consider the M4300 instead because they are stackable and have 10G uplink. Also Netgear does have a focus on its more current line of products. The M4100 still have a place but the main focus seems to be on the M4300. They cost a bit more, but there are other actually nice things that the M4100's lack such as hot-plug (and if you want: redundant) power supplies.
