ExtremeSwitching Reviews

I have been a network engineer since the mid-nineties. The company I am in now has19 buildings and 50 plus switches, all Extreme. We use lots of gen one and gen twos — either the X460s or X690s — using the SummitStack. That is our standard variant of the Extreme Networks.  

We do have a couple of old 460s and a couple of old 480s, but we use the SummitStack for those versions instead of the Black Diamond.  

I have been using ExtremeSwitching for so long that it is really natural for me. I just use them. I guess if I had to pick something I really like, it would maybe be the ease of using their protocol. They use ring topology protocol. Using that protocol is somewhat unique to Extreme. It is actually really handy.  

I think Extreme can learn a few things from Cisco's approach. That is not to say that trying to become Cisco would be an improvement for Extreme. It is just that they might acknowledge the differences in the direction the solutions have taken and maybe learn from what Cisco does right. They are different even though they set out to accomplish the same thing.  

To call Extreme wrong for their approach would be like telling people in Great Britain that their drivers are bad because they drive on the left side of the road. They have been driving on that side of the road and that's what they chose to do. They are not going to just go and change it one day so they all drive on the right side of the road. It would be a pretty big undertaking in adjusting to it. I do not think that is going to improve Extreme's product to try and imitate Cisco. Making that kind of a major change is not something you should do just to be like another product and it would not be a way to improve what you do.  

I would say that they could learn from what Cisco does right. Extreme needs to improve on their training. They have been working on it, but they do not really have enough training classes and learning resources for users at this point. When we first put ExtremeSwitches in, it was very complex. I think that might have been because no one had any real experience with the product and people were more likely to be familiar with Cisco if they did have experience. The training was not up to speed.  

Extreme aught to take that into account and at least offer more resources to learn the products. If engineers are coming from the Cisco world, it is really like pulling your mind through the looking glass or driving on the other side of the road. It is just a totally different way of thinking. Cisco had a 12-year head start on the market. More people see switching from a Cisco perspective.  

Other than offering training, they are getting better. When I have a problem, I can at least look up a solution online. But with Extreme Switches, if you look online, you are just not going to get as much information and options as you do with a search for problems on Cisco. Everybody and their brother could tell you stuff about Cisco because they are familiar with it.  

In some way, it is a benefit to have less information. When there is not as much stuff out there, then you have less stuff to sort through. With Cisco there is so much you might have to determine where the reliable resources are. With Extreme the resources are more limited but sometimes that means that you will not get the answer you are looking for.  

We have been using ExtremeSwitching for at least eight years.  

After the first year where we were having some stability issues, things came around. Now we are good for stability. If any part of what we have breaks, Extreme will just replace it.  

Extreme is quite scalable. We have a lot of buildings (19) a lot of switches (50+), and multiple fiber rings. I do not think we are limited in our ability to grow from that at all.  

Right now, there are only two of us doing the maintenance. Before I got sick earlier in the year, there was only one person on the maintenance. So now it is two people on the team, but working with Extreme is not the only thing that we do. We share the responsibility.  

I have no idea how we compare in size to other similar companies. We have 550 employees, and we are a 24/7 shop, like police and fire — or maybe public works. We have to be ready when we are needed.  

Tech support, in my case, refers more to training than calling in tickets. When Extreme bought Enterasys, they had a bit of a rocky start with that merger. But Extreme's tech support has been okay. We have got a better integration partner now and that helps.  

When we first bought the Extreme product, they had all of two classes. That is it. They were both online. The two of the courses put together were only a week long. That was all the training you could possibly get for Extreme Network Switches at the time.  

Think of that compared to the kind of training and support you can get from HP and Cisco on their equipment before you go to implement their products. Extreme's programs did not even come close to covering everything. There were parts of the product, like their management platform, that they did not even mention even though it is a valuable part of the system.  

They have been improving on their training, but I do not know how far they have taken it at this point.  

I have worked with both Cisco and Extreme at different times. It is almost like Alice in the Looking Glass when you compare Extreme to Cisco. Cisco uses iOS. Extreme uses xOS. These two solutions are so different. With Cisco, you configure by port — you assign everything to a port. With Extreme, you assign everything — all the ports — to a VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network). It is almost like they work in the opposite way of each other. You have to get used to adopting the mindset of the solution you are using and just do it their way.  

Extreme hardware is also less expensive than the Cisco equipment. That is a biggie in making the comparison.  

I think the initial setup was complex. Really it was extremely complex.  

We did an RFP (Request for Proposal) and a vendor came in to put the product in. One of the problems we had that we obviously could not have known at the time was that the vendor did not necessarily know enough about how Extreme worked. It was a systems engineer from Extreme that implemented the RFP and even he did not know the product well. Then he left Extreme to go to another company. We were left holding the bag.  

For the first year, there were some glitches and gotchas that we kept running into. But after that year — and after we switched integrators — then we were in much better shape.  

All I can say about Extreme pricing is that it is much less expensive than Cisco and more expensive than HP. It is less expensive than Tesco by a mile. On pricing, it is going to beat most of the major competition.  

The products we buy are influenced by our company's business model. Everything we want to implement that is over 30-grand, we have to do an RFP for. So a lot of times to get under that threshold, we go with the lowest possible bidder just to get things done. We have bought stuff that I have never even seen before. I had never even heard of Tegile Arrays until we bought their products. I had never even heard of Extreme Networks until we bought their products either.  

Advice that I would give to people considering switches is that I think Extreme products are pretty feature-rich and they are definitely worth considering alongside the competition. They just have to be aware they are not going to be working like they would with Cisco, which means fewer resources and potentially fewer candidates to work with the solution as engineers.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate ExtremeSwitching as an eight-out-of-ten.  

We are customers of ExtremeSwitching. 

Their number one valuable feature is the inspection firewalls that carry out a deep packet inspection on a port basis. It's a feature they've had for a number of years. Our customers like the switching, which does the deep packet inspections but can also write traffic from one VLAN to the next.

Extreme has become more aggressive with its pricing. The cost per switch per port has come down quite a bit, making it very competitive in the small and medium-size market. It has made the solution more favorable. 

All the solutions in this market are lacking cyber asset attack, surface management. It's not just Extreme, but Cisco, Juniper and Arista as well. The new multi-access age is upon us. In other words, billions of sensors and billions of IOT devices are all wirelessly connected and therefore cellular 5G communications, wifi and broad-spectrum communications are missing from the edge platforms. As a result, we're doing well with DOD and enterprise customers, because they have their Extreme core switches, but the switches don't understand cellular 5G, broad-spectrum. We provide value in that space. We offer the opportunity to go through APIs and integrate into wireless technologies. It's missing from the platform. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years, from the time it was owned by Motorola. 

The solution is stable. We have certified Extreme engineers who are very familiar with the solution. Depending on the service level agreement with our customers, we typically have three or four qualified staff members that can handle Extreme.

There is no problem with scalability. We have stackable switches for the IDFs and they have core switches for the MDFs. They can extend VLANs to the edge. 

The tech support is very helpful although there's always room for improvement. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward as long as you have an open API so it's just a matter of connecting the APIs that feed the threat intelligence into the infrastructure.

if you're looking to embrace Extreme, it is a good alternative to Arista or to Cisco, but I would encourage investing in the certification of one or two people; one on the writing side and one on the firewall side. The OS is different for each product and I'm a big fan of defense and depth, meaning different routers at the edge, different switches at the core. Extreme is competitive from a price perspective. They're a really good alternative to a default Cisco, but I just think the OS and the underlying features are kind of quirky. You need someone on staff familiar with it.

Extreme doesn't have their own APs, they're leveraging the Motorola stuff they acquired. A lot of the extreme access points are now end-of-life, and customers that are using the T5, T511's and the T524 switches, which is kind of the VDSL and the Cat3 version, are upgrading because they're end-of-life.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for the networking infrastructure. Actually, we use lots of products. Some are for the center of the infrastructure, and some are for the distribution and so on. 

In our country, we have established a good relationship with the local representatives, and they made a good contract between us and the US, and they have offered good-priced performance rates for us. Mostly the price and the performance have been very valuable aspects of the solution for us.  

You can scale the solution if you want to.

The stability has been largely pretty good.

The interface could be improved. Over the last few years, there have been acquisitions. Due to that, that, inevitably, there were some difficulties to get one management platform and keep it simple. Therefore, the interface, the user interface, the graphical user interface mostly, can be improved. 

I've been using the solution for more than 20 years. The brand's name has changed three times since I have started using them.

The solution is mostly stable. We haven't really had any large problems with it over ht years. 

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem. 

We have about 2,000 users on the solution currently.

I just started at a different company that is also using this solution, and I am unsure as to if the company has plans to increase usage at this time. 

Technical support has been very helpful and responsive. We've enjoyed working with them for the most part so far. 

The initial setup's level of difficulty can vary. It depends on the different settings that are needed by the company.

The pricing of the product has been reasonable. It's not overly expensive. 

I am just a customer and an end-user.

At my company, we tend to use private cloud deployments as we prefer to use private configurations.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I've been satisfied with how the solution has worked for me over the years. 

I would recommend the solution, however, I would like to point out that it's very important to determine the real necessities of the organizations, and then select key products or brands that make sense.