My last position was as a network admin in a Cisco shop. My entire networking career has been in Cisco. My new job uses Dell switches and managed Cisco routers. I'm not a fan of the Dell switches. The ones I've interacted with so far have not impressed me.
My new position is a senior net admin and I'm the one making the decisions. I've been told that if I want to phase out the Dells and phase in something else, it's all my decision. I've got my first switch I need to swap out. I could go with the Cisco and go back to what I know, but I'm not sure if that's the right route.
I've been looking at Juniper and liking what I'm reading about it. Considering grabbing a Juniper switch to try that out and see if that's what I want to go to.
But, I want to make sure my use case makes sense for Juniper. We are a decent sized credit union (in the top 5 in this state). 13 branches. Each branch (except the main one) has 2 x 48 port PoE switches. Supporting about 250 employees total. 20MB connections to the main branch which has a 100M connection to the internet. Currently, everything comes through the main branch. However, we are looking at moving to either a datacenter or to VMC on AWS and if that happens, I will route most traffic directly to the datacenter/VMC unless it has to come here for some reason.
Finally, I'm looking at bringing more automation into this place, and that includes network automation (something I've read is really nice on Juniper). I also want to look more into SDN and SD-WAN in the near future though I won't do that until we figure out the datacenter/VMC thing.
Finally, if Juniper is a good fit, is there a good place to see equivalencies between Juniper models and Cisco models? For instance, I would probably use a 2960 to replace this dying Dell switch but have no idea which Juniper model is somewhat equivalent.
Appreciate the help.
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