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I'm not saying Cisco kit isn't good. Just that the idea that Cisco is better than all other kit and 'no one ever got fired for using Cisco' and the roll of the eyes if you suggest to a CCNA that maybe some other vendor's kit is much better value for money or you can get faster kit with more feature for the same price seems misplaced.

Cisco have had more than their fair share of security vulnerabilities, have US government hacking, have had errors that have forced the kit to not work properly, bugs, failed components etc. Just like any other manufacturer can have, however for Cisco kit you have to pay a premium for it.

For some operations it may be the only usable operation, sure but they are few and far between. I remember having a discussion with someone once about a datacentre switch . The 1 Gig switch he was showing was about 5% faster than the competition and had 10Gig SFP+ ports for the backbone or high throughput servers. It cost a lot of money. I pointed out that you could get a full rack of 10Gig ethernet ports on a switch, with all the features that were required for half the price and it also had 4 SFP+ ports for extended connectivity over fibre. Not only that the SFP+ fibre modules were 1/5th price. Not cisco though was it, reliability, industry standard etc etc. Anyway we used the other manufacturer and after 5 years it was still running, and supporting an ethernet SAN.

Yes it took a little to learn the new terms for the equivalent Cisco proprietary functions (but which performed the same thing) and command line was different but logically the same. However many features were far, far better - like a proper centralised management system, greater estate visibility, shallower learning curve with a fairly decent GUI for less experienced techs, Even the switch monitoring software could read flows from them and save configs, however most was just SNMP anyway.

If the thinking is 'it has to be Cisco' then you can miss out on some great products and you might end up buying rubbish like their Phone system rather than one of the much better alternatives, or something inappropriate for your organisation like the Cisco WiFi can be.