How to buy Cisco equipment

I'm looking for some advice on buying CIsco equipment. I have bought a few switches and routers mostly for labs, but currently I need to buy a whole new setup to replace everything we have at work. We have a fairly small user base and about 6 switches at the moment. I'm just getting lost in the amount of features / options that are out there. I know the only thing that I require is STP + VLANs (which seem to be on almost all things i've seen), and MPLS support (jumbo frames?). I've seen alot of Cisco's small business routers on newegg, whats the dfference in these vs CIscos full blown products?

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Comments

tiersten

Cisco own Linksys now so most of the SOHO or home products are actually Linksys products.

If you're a company then go find a Cisco reseller and talk to them. Depending on the size of the order, they may be able to do a discount for you.

Are you sure you need MPLS support?

tiersten

Depending on the size of the link, the smallest router that does MPLS would be something like an 1841.

Kasor

You can always look for other brand? Cisco is not the only one out there. 3com, Avaya, Juniper

sidsanders

do you have any decent reselers in your area that you can contact?

msteinhilber

Last I saw, Newegg offered real Cisco gear on their website but they are not an authorized Cisco reseller, so you would be purchasing SMARTnet through another vendor.

dynamik

msteinhilber wrote: »

Last I saw, Newegg offered real Cisco gear on their website but they are not an authorized Cisco reseller, so you would be purchasing SMARTnet through another vendor.

Is CDW?

NightShade03

I do know that there is other equipment out there besides CIsco however most I like Cisco's equipment and am familiar with their IOS already. There are resellers in the area I will have to look into though because I don't know any off hand.

I started looking on newegg and saw a couple of things that they offered by Cisco (which weren't too bad a deal). SMARTnet is the support contract yes? I don't think that we will be buying one. CDW does sell a ton of Cisco equipment as well, will look into their prices.

There seems to be so many different features that each model offers which is really what throws me when comparing items.

msteinhilber

dynamik wrote: »

Is CDW?

Yea, CDW is Gold certified I believe. That's where we purchase the majority of our equipment as well as SMARTnet sku's.