On 29/Jun/20 19:37, Matt Harris wrote:
Cisco doesn't want to sell 2960 series anymore and they made that perfectly clear to me over the past couple of years. I ended up switching to Juniper EX gear in places I had been deploying 2960's previously. The EX3400 lineup is better priced than the newer Cisco stuff, and imho a better value overall in terms of what you get.
If you stick with Cisco, you'll likely be going with the Cat9200 or Cat9300 series. They're good switches, to be sure, but at the end of the day the Junipers are just as good and cheaper.
For aggregation, we haven't bought Cisco switches for anything since 2014, when invested in a bunch of 3650's (they run IOS XE). We use these purely as Layer 2 switches in low-density applications where we need copper ports to connect to supporting services, e.g., DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TACACS+, RPKI, NMS, e.t.c. We used the EX4550 for years until their buffers became too small as customer demand for bandwidth increased. We couldn't find anything in the Cisco stable that made sense, and Juniper's EX4600 was very strange when they switched to the ELS Junos code. So we went with Arista's 7208R in the data centre to replace the EX4550's. I have no experience with Arista's IP feature set on their switches, but I hear it is maturing slowly. Mark.