Switching to cisco worth the money?

Current setup for ~30 local workstations at a 24/7 company, with 2 replicated servers, 1 remote backup server, 1 remote location:
Unknown router but it's not cisco, it's a white blade that's ISP installed, I think this might be leased line running to remote location.
Cable modem running into white blade
2 sonic walls
3x 24 unmanaged gbit switches

Is it really worth spending $1000's replacing this?

There's 5 different departments so I thought VLAN's might be a big advantage but I can't explain it well enough. Lack of QOS isn't a problem, I don't think, there's no network congestion issues and the remote backup will happen in offhours. External security is a concern but not internal, for example the server closet door is usually open, for cooling, with a terminal on all the time but only 3 people know what to do with it and they've never had an issue. I'd like it for cisco knowledge, which is a bit selfish but I realize the company would much rather save money.

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techfiend

That would really help, well switches and whatever the white blade is, which has to be responsible for routing. I've only been told it's an ISP's.

darkerz

So,

What are you trying to accomplish on a business level? Imagine you run a business unit, someone comes up to you and says "We need to spend 1000's of dollars!"...

Well, why? If it works, don't fix it.

colemic

I second darkerz- what problem are you trying to solve?

techfiend

I can't think of a reason in this situation maybe someone with cisco knowledge can. An internal security crisis might give it a consideration but it hasn't happened 25+ years.

techfiend

colemic wrote: »

I second darkerz- what problem are you trying to solve?

There's no real problem and it's really me just being selfish trying to get cisco experience. I was trying to gather really good reasons to spend the money. I have very little cisco knowledge.

gorebrush

Then in that case just buy some $20 routers and play around with them...

Priston

How can you replace something if you don't know what it is?

If I tell you I need the memory replaced in my computer and I don't tell you what speed or how many pins my current memory is, how would you know what memory to get?

I think before you try redesigning your current network. You need to learn how it works first.

gbdavidx

get CCNA first then think about switching over

Adam B

darkerz wrote: »

So,

What are you trying to accomplish on a business level? Imagine you run a business unit, someone comes up to you and says "We need to spend 1000's of dollars!"...

Well, why? If it works, don't fix it.

I had this same issue at work my first few days. I wondered where all the cisco equipment was. But I realized, with what we had and the amount of load on our network, we didn't need layer three switches with indepth configs and so forth. Although you could obviously set up the network in such a way, as darkerz says, it already works, so there's nothing to fix; which means spending can't be justified.

I'd recommend buying a lab and working with the equipment at home.

techfiend

OK I think it's a pretty unanimous no, which was expected. I do plan on buying a lab when I get going on CCNA and will probably learn a lot more with it then I would on an SMB network. Thing is cisco means a lot more under experience instead of skills on a resume.

Let me ask this then, why would a company spend money on cisco instead of a cheaper alternative?

MTciscoguy

techfiend wrote: »

Let me ask this then, why would a company spend money on cisco instead of a cheaper alternative?

Name recognition, reliability and more likely to be able to find techs to work with it, they just have more time in. If you were to line 10 people up in the IT field it is almost a given 8 of those 10 have worked on Cisco equipment. Lets face it, there are a lot of us out there that have worked with Cisco stuff over the years!

In the whole scope of things, putting together a Cisco lab is really quite inexpensive, and you will be able to come up with situations on your own lab, that believe it or not, you might never really see in a working environment.

techfiend

More techs that know cisco is very realistic but that's also probably costing companies more money. I'd imagine a cisco certified employee is going to make more than one that isn't with everything else equal. 10 of those 10 people could deal with an unmanaged switch and a basic router. While I understand large, complex networks using cisco for doing unusual setups I don't know about SMB's. Why would an SMB on a basic network that just has to work choose cisco over unmanaged switches and basic routers?

On certlabs there's some ccna lab kits cheaper than A+ tests. Even if I was getting cisco experience I would still buy a lab for home, there's only so much you can do on a crucial operating network and most of that isn't going to teach much.

I was looking for experience mainly for resume but who knows if all goes well I'll probably be at my current job for years if I get promoted to a JOAT and am headed down the MCSA path at WGU to improve my chances of that promotion. I'm in a newly created position at this company and they've always contracted the same guy to come in and handle everything above basic support but the response to issues was often a day or two. The company is really growing, they outgrew their original location, which is now the remote office, 2 years ago and came to their current HQ with a half full office, now there's only 2 empty seats that are looking to be filled in the near future. Maybe at some point they will require cisco hardware.

MTciscoguy: Could your role be compared to a one man onsite MSP for SMB's?

gorebrush

I worked for an SMB - we had Cisco Telephony so that kinda neeeded QoS and all the other tools you don't get on "cheap" switches.

Though the previous company that owned the one I worked for did like to splash the cash a bit.

techfiend

They have a cisco conference phone in the conference room and heavily rely on phones. I think they use ISP voip with internal RJ11 and haven't had any problems with it.

The company has been spending a bit of money, they are replacing ~30 workstations with i3 and i5 when they could get away with celeron and pentium/i3, maybe it's future proofing. I've decided to not bring up cisco with them again and really looking forward to helping with server 2012 migration, it should be great experience.

gorebrush

Ugh, Celeron!

The money they would save on skimping on desktops just not worth it. The amount of people I made happy by simply upgrading RAM in their machines to over 1GB (back in 2006/2007, this was a lot for XP) and swapping out Celerons for REAL computers - happy workers are productive workers.

techfiend

I know celerons have a terrible reputation but they aren't the same old celerons.

My celeron htpc is just as fast as my i3 laptop on everyday things and benchmarks are very close. They could have saved about $3200 choosing celerons over i3's, and $1500 choosing i3's over i5's. Plenty of savings to switch over to cisco but I digress. They are coming from Pentium D XP machines and would probably be much better off upgrading to ssd instead of i3/i5. Many places I've visited lately are happily running atom's for basic office stuff, a celeron is one giant step above those.

gorebrush

The problem ultimately here is that it is very difficult to justify a company of this size dropping thousands on Cisco gear - when ultimately I can't see the need for it?

Small companies are often squeezed when it comes to networking equipment and I'd often get laughed at in SMB's for making small suggestions - to be honest I'd probably go to a bigger company if I were you!

MTciscoguy

techfiend wrote: »

MTciscoguy: Could your role be compared to a one man onsite MSP for SMB's?

I guess you could call me an independent consultant/repair person, not many of the companies where I live have full time or even part time people to deal with equipment and configuration, I work on what ever they call about, which often times is old stuff because they can't justify the cost of upgrading their systems.

techfiend

Interesting that's pretty much the type of role the guy I'm learning from is in right now. Has a company ever hired a full time employee to replace your services? If so, what situation(s) were they in to justify it (growing, many issues, installing new system, etc.)?

discount81

techfiend wrote: »

That would really help, well switches and whatever the white blade is, which has to be responsible for routing. I've only been told it's an ISP's.

If the ISP has provided you a router, odds are it is for a reason, you can't just buy a piece of equipment to replace it you've got no idea what their configuration is.

Also Cisco is pretty standard, but in a business of that size I could never justify buying Cisco gear when a L3 HP ProCurve switch is half the price.

You should always do what is right for the business, sometimes it means getting cheaper equipment that is not your preference but you know it will do the job.
Or sometimes it means convincing management you need something more expensive because the cheaper gear does not meet their requirements.

but in this case you simply want some Cisco gear to learn on.

By the way it's awfully difficult to really learn much about something when it is production, you can't play around with the configuration.

techfiend

I'm content with the lack of cisco now, convincing reasons to upgrade is what I was trying to find in this thread. If something does go wrong with the networking hardware, I may bring up cisco then but until then I'll keep quiet.

True you aren't going to learn much on a production router/switch but having under experience helped setup and maintain cisco hardware would look great on a resume, I think. Much better than labbed at home and passed CCNA.

techfiend

So I found out the white box is the csu/dsu for a 2xT1 bonded backup internet line (for cable), costly for the bandwidth but they might switch to satellite as a backup in the near future.

A sonicwall is being used as the router which is load balancing the 2 internet links. Is there anything bad about doing this? What would be the advantages of a traditional router, probably cisco?

discount81

Not to sound condescending but let me give you some advice .

I assume you are reasonably new at this company, and maybe only a few years into an IT career.

You are going about this the wrong way, it sounds like their current set up is good and works well, the scenario you said is perfectly normal for a small company to use, not many small businesses have end to end Cisco equipment because it's too damn expensive.

You are trying to fix a situation that does not need fixing.
If you go to the CEO/President/CFO or whoever and ask for $10000 for a new Cisco equipment to replace the current set up, they will inevitably ask for justification and a return on investment calculations, which in IT can be difficult at the best of times to justify spending.
" Yeah this will route packets more efficiently and make our staff more productive? "

Now if they did approve this purchase, you now have to actually replace all this equipment and no offence to you but it does not sound like you have done this before.
You have to speak with 2 ISP's and configure equipment for their settings.
Assuming you get this all set up and working, lets say there is a problem in a week and you can't resolve it instantly, without a doubt the management will casually mention how "This never happened before".

Basically you are putting yourself in a position to potentially fail for absolutely no reason what so ever.

My suggestion is, find out how old the Sonicwall and other equipment is, if it is over 5 years old maybe suggest they review it.
If it is under 5 years old and there are no issues known, keep it.
Don't automatically suggest buying Cisco, they realistically do not need a $1500 router when a $700 one will do what they want.

Now another point, management has an assumption that IT just wants to spend money all the time, and you are only reinforcing the stereotype by using your initiative to find places to spend money.

Use your initiative to find places to SAVE money, something I almost always do when I see a company with no paperless strategy is get a 30 day trial of Papercut and leave that running for the month without any settings to block or affect printing, produce some reports for management after a month to show how much they are spending each month on printing.
A lot of times they are astounded and realize they can save 10's of thousands per year by adjusting their printing usages.

If you show management a way to save money, they will view you differently rather than always bringing them a PO to spend their money.

techfiend wrote: »

So I found out the white box is the csu/dsu for a 2xT1 bonded backup internet line (for cable), costly for the bandwidth but they might switch to satellite as a backup in the near future.

A sonicwall is being used as the router which is load balancing the 2 internet links. Is there anything bad about doing this? What would be the advantages of a traditional router, probably cisco?

--chris--

techfiend wrote: »

So I found out the white box is the csu/dsu for a 2xT1 bonded backup internet line (for cable), costly for the bandwidth but they might switch to satellite as a backup in the near future.

A sonicwall is being used as the router which is load balancing the 2 internet links. Is there anything bad about doing this? What would be the advantages of a traditional router, probably cisco?

Nothing wrong with that setup, I see it in place quite a bit. I would suggest they have a backup sonic wall ready to go, if they are willing to spend a little thats a great investment. Identify any single points of failure and find ways to remediate them.

techfiend

Thanks guys, I always appreciate good constructive criticism. I only had a week or two of IT experience when I started this thread and this is my first IT job. I'm still learning the ropes and I've never pushed for anything, I've asked the manager if it's a good idea to present to the ceo but I really haven't said anything about cisco since this thread. You are probably right about the cisco router but I'm confident I know enough to get it up and running in a reasonable amount of time, albeit probably not optimally. I'm not sure how long they've had this setup but it is working well, today I was getting 85-90 MB\s transferring a 4GB iso, that's 20 MB\s more than my home network using a linksys branded cisco router. I've thought of some money cutting things and they print a lot, I'll try out papercut. My second day was mostly spent setting everyone's printer to double-sided black and white by default.

I thought of sleeping all the computers, which would save about $100 a month but the proprietary program doesn't handle it correctly and throws errors and it's a hassle to quit the app and restart it. Also RDP doesn't use WOL, I'd rather not try to instruct everyone they need to run another program on their home computers to rdp and WOL isn't the most reliable thing, not worth the headache.

They have a backup sonicwall and due to many outdated rules on the current one they might switch to the clean backup and start fresh. I suggested they get rid of the iis and ad standalone servers, they thought this was a good idea and plan to do it during the migration, which should make a little dent in the power bill. They are both old and the ad is running dns which fails on occasion and is always a big mess, I've offered to restart the service automatically at slow times as a workaround until the migration, this is still up in the air.

They don't plan on getting rid of these 2 boxes until they migrate 2003 -> 2012. The plan is on having 3 servers with 4 esxi vm's, 1 main and 2 replicants and a standalone box running veeam, I don't know if that requires a server OS or not. They think they can get away with 2 standard server licenses for the servers and then possibly one for the backup box, this idea comes from only have 4 vm's in production at a time. After googling I think they need 6 for the servers, which one is correct?

There's a few selling oem datacenter 2012 for 5 cpu's on ebay almost as cheap as a standard retail 2012 from microsoft. Are the ebay sellers worth considering? They say they are microsoft resellers... but internet.

--chris--

Is the environment / processes audited? Thats a "hot" topic among management this year, business owners are clamoring for assurance they wont be the next victim.

See what you can find as far as free scanners go to look into your environment and see what services, ports, servers, apps are open on the network and not in use? Get approval from your manager or feed these to him and let him make the decisions on what gets done.

Microsoft makes a few scanners (IT Health Scanner, Baseline security scanner), I have had some trouble getting the first to run well but I am sure with some tinkering it would work.

Anything to shore up the network internally, save money and ensure the network stays up will look good on you.

edit: For more detailed advice, spend some time reading the SANS white papers. Excellent info.

rcsoar4fun

As mentioned above, it depends what you are trying to accomplish. Your situation sounds like your average small business. It is common to have a "built as needed" network that was put together with whatever Best Buy had on the shelf. In general it has worked for many successful businesses.

Here is my experience with the consumer/SMB switches from any of the big vendors. They mostly work most of the time

but tend to have quirks. Often things like spanning tree do not really work like they should. Sometimes it is never any issue. Other times it leads to ghosts in the network that you end up chasing. Those sort of ghosts tend to get you called in at midnight. I like to avoid that. It is also often the case you don't really get the kind of speeds you are expecting. Again, normally not an issue as most people will never fully utilize a gig connection anyway.

So why do companies spend $4000 on a Cisco or Juniper switch instead of a $40 Linksys? One is stability, reliability and robustness. I have 10 year old switches that are exposed to salt air every day. With the exception of fans they do what I ask of them day after day. If it does take a **** Cisco has lifetime warranty on hardware. The other thing is support and documentation. If I need to know how to do something on a Cisco switch I can find it in under 5 minutes. Finally, if you are willing to pay for SmartNet Cisco support is nothing short of amazing. I can call them at 4pm reporting I am having issues with a $25,000 blade and when I arrive at work the next day a replacement is waiting for me. Is it worth the cost? Depends what downtime is worth to your business.

My recommendation in most of these cases is to look around for some used Cisco gear. A 3560 will run between $150 and $200. A 3550 is even cheaper at around $50. The only real functional difference is the way QoS works. Sure they are used, but buy a couple of extras. In your situation I would chat with your boss and decide if there is a business case to change. If there is then consider buying one or two a month and doing a phased implementation.

Finally, the most important comment you made. Sorry, as a CISSP I just can't help myself.

Please, I beg of you to reconsider your stance on physical security.

"External security is a concern but not internal, for example the server closet door is usually open, for cooling, with a terminal on all the time but only 3 people know what to do with it and they've never had an issue."

Is there any value in the data on the server? Of course there is you wouldn't have a server. Most attacks on businesses are INTERNAL and not external. Imagine you have a disgruntled employee that knows he is about to be fired and wants to embarrass the company. He does a little googling and finds he can download a virus to a USB stick. One afternoon while no one is watching he pops the stick in the back of the server and walks out. How long would it take you to realize there was an issue?

Without physical security there is no security.

techfiend

Thing is the router is a sonicwall and use unmanaged switches they have backups of both sitting right in the closet. QoS isn't something they need, I don't think, no one has ever complained about the network being slow and it's actually very fast, 80-90 MB\s which I've never seen on a gigabit lan. The 100mbit internet link isn't really a bottleneck either. I haven't been convinced they need to use different network gear.

The company looks at the open server closet as not a big deal. I think it's an issue and there is an occasional customer walking close to it at times. I took it up with the 'security guy' last week and he's been working on it ever since. The temps in the closet are around 80F and humidity is 18%, both of these aren't good. He managed to get it down to 75F with the same relative humidity, it's now one of the coolest places in the office. The office overall is very warm and the heat is set at 70F but between 8-4 it's in the high 70's, cooling down to the low 70's after hours. I've been trying to work with him with this too.

rcsoar4fun

A network can require QoS without being slow. The QoS is just there to move certain traffic (Voice and video) to the front of the line ahead of things like FTP which can be delayed without significantly affecting performance.

Deathmage

techfiend wrote: »

Current setup for ~30 local workstations at a 24/7 company, with 2 replicated servers, 1 remote backup server, 1 remote location:
Unknown router but it's not cisco, it's a white blade that's ISP installed, I think this might be leased line running to remote location.
Cable modem running into white blade
2 sonic walls
3x 24 unmanaged gbit switches

Is it really worth spending $1000's replacing this?

There's 5 different departments so I thought VLAN's might be a big advantage but I can't explain it well enough. Lack of QOS isn't a problem, I don't think, there's no network congestion issues and the remote backup will happen in offhours. External security is a concern but not internal, for example the server closet door is usually open, for cooling, with a terminal on all the time but only 3 people know what to do with it and they've never had an issue. I'd like it for cisco knowledge, which is a bit selfish but I realize the company would much rather save money.

1st off, get that server room door secured, I've dealt with way to many people that knew enough to cause problems and unplug a router or server, here is a fine example, your unmanaged swtiches, say a curious user, let call him Joe, walks into the server room and seeing a dangling Cat5e cable hanging from the switch and being the helpful person that Joe is he plugs it into the switch thinking he's smart and walks away, your out to lunch, within about oo probably 15 seconds every computer on the network with lose connectivity (congratulation you've won the Spanning-Tree Award) and you get a phone call from your boss screaming, it's really not worth the trouble of a $5 lock! ... trust me I know!!!!! ...it happened to me 3 days on the job at my IT manager position 4 years ago!!! I went to Home Depot myself and bought the lock and did it myself!

Is there a HVAC system in-place? - if not that's worrisome to say the least. 70 degrees with a humidity of 18% can be a problem, if that equipment runs hot it will have a performance tick on the overall feel of the network. You see when thereis huminity and dust in a server room you run a very high risk for static discharge. I worked in a paper plant and it was always dusty, computer would die all the time. Humidity+warmth+dust= static discharge and bam electronics are goners. An example, I used to have 10 HP 8150dn printer in reserve at all times since static discharge was the number one culprit, it was more cost effective than keeping the plant clean; at $1500 each I never understood the savings...then again my IT budget was $750,000 a year.

vlans aren't really needed for such a small operation, you really need to look at the unmanaged switch and see what the backplane is on them to really gauge if they should be replaced. You would want 120 Gbps Minimum of 24 port switches (some may say 1.5 but I do 2.5, it's really what your comfortable with in terms of future growth); I normally go by this equation (1000 for gigabit and 100 for fast Ethernet)[1000x2x[total ports]=Y then times this by 2.5 for growth. Now, thinking about this for a second, vlans would be helpful if there replicate during the day, when sites and services replicate (but that traffic is dismal honestly), and laslty if they have printers send huge ars AutoCAD prints then it would be helpful. I used over 15 vlans across (3) /23 subnets being used by 6 Corrugator vendors and boy did that network purr like a kitten, I never once had contention of network resources. Hence why I love HP Procurves!

Now if the remote backup server is doing backups at all during the day, then this would be a fine example of use for a vlan and the need for a higher backplane, if it's not running during the day (and I hope it's not) then you should be fine.

Two Sonicwalls seems a bit excessive, are they in Heartbeat HA mode? One thing to also ask; how many concurrent VPN tunnels are being maintained at there peak usage? ... that would be something to consider if speed is becoming an issue that users are complaining about especially if on-site users are doing internet surfing for pleasure or work which is dependent upon the Public IP-facing down/up pipe. If those Sonicwalls have Content filtering, make sure Social Media is blocked, if it's not and someone streams Youtube or a website with a high-caching media stream it will tank your IP-facing pipe. I used to be a Sonicwall freak at my last job, I used to get kicks out of blocking all of the 800+ Wyse thin clients from access anything but www.google.com everything else would say "Access Denied, call your Sonicwall Administrator", used to give me a chuckle all the time seeing those ants try for hours to break down my wall!

As far as QoS is concerned, do you use any video conferencing in your conference room an example is Lifesize, if you have one, or VOIP phones, those can suck a LAN down to a crawl. QoS would be really helpful for your failover T1 lines in the event of a disaster, so that certain traffic has a priority like say phone calls if you have a POTS line channel on the T1 in-case of emergencies for like a auto-attendant phone system.

However without knowing the backplane and if there is no real issue to report, why fix anything? I wouldn't touch it, unless there is a problem.

Also if JOAT's is something you want, get your Network + and Security + soon, I miss being a JOAT's it was a ton of fun. I learned pretty much everything IT has to offer in 4 years and boy was it a ride. Loved every second of it, best of luck to you!!!!!