TL;DR: Is there an enterprise-grade network vendor who can provide a good alternative to Cisco's quality of wired and wireless networking along with ISE and Stealthwatch? And is it as well integrated?
We're a medium sized business (1-200 employees) based in the UK, and we're looking to do a complete refresh of wired and wireless networking at our head office. (We have branch offices but all users use VPN.)
One of our main concerns moving forward with this network refresh is security, and I've used ISE at previous employers with great success for securing the wired and wireless networks, and I'd like to deploy that again along with StealthWatch. DNA is also on our radar but is $$$$ and so we probably won't do it. We're working with a great Cisco partner on the proposal who have a proven track record of good ISE implementations, so I'm not worried that we'll end up with an expensive brick of a solution.
One of the things I'm conscious of is that I see a lot of posts on here discussing the great alternatives to Cisco, particularly in light of Cisco's relatively recent changes to the licensing models that means you are pretty much a slave to their licenses. I don't see this as necessarily being a bad thing for our business use case, but it has given me pause to think about other possible vendors, and I know that we'll be asked about it as part of due diligence anyway.
Security is the big requirement here, but we are also wanting to pass 10GbE iSCSI traffic for our servers and storage. There will be no FC or FCoE, so no need (necessarily) for Nexus. Ease of management is also an important thing for us.
So, with that in mind - is there an enterprise-grade network vendor who can provide a good alternative to Cisco's quality of wired and wireless networking along with ISE and Stealthwatch? And is it as well integrated?
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