Thursday, November 12, 2020

Ignitenet? Anyone ever used them?

for a little background: (feel free to skip to the Bold TL;DR in paragraph 6)

I've been using Ubiquiti gear for the last few years (I know, eye-roll. I'm finally there too). I'm becoming less and less happy with their hardware, software, and support quality. Simple stupid bugs that shouldn't exist go ignored for months or longer and if you actually need support, there is no one to call about it you have to post in the forums or submit a ticket that goes widely ignored by their nonexistent support staff. As an MSP I'm able to fix the majority of the issues on any site within a few minutes but the issues are becoming more painful with each software release, some of my sites are significantly negative on the paid out hours for service vs income from the MSP contract and its getting worse and worse. Frankly I've been sick of it for a while and have started shopping for alternatives.

Meraki, no. I've worked with it, I'm not a fan. Mediocre hardware at best, ridiculous price point on said hardware and recurring licensing costs with kill switches. Many of my existing clients already decided against Meraki before I ever entered the picture so its not a good fit for me.

I initially discovered Datto Networking but i saw a LOT of negative feedback about their Product line here on Reddit so I've nixed that unless things have significantly changed...

I also discovered Aerohive / Extreme A3 platform but at $10,000 base + $7000 for a 1000 device... $17,000 a year is upside down without renegotiating every contract i have. also a little too steep for me right now.

Aruba has a cloud platform. but it seems Meraki-ish in how it prices yearly device licensing. I'd prefer something that i wouldn't need to foot the bill on if my customer is late paying me. While a kill-switch is a motivator, it also makes clients hate you (loop back to why most of my customers despise Meraki).

TL;RD:

That's when i stumbled on Ignitenet Fusion Switches and Sunspot and Spark Access Points. Their hardware is not unreasonably priced, and their EC cloud subscription is on an MSP level rather than a customer or device level and priced actually really reasonably at that. I've set the cloud up as a trial to play with the feature set and I'm not unimpressed with the offering... however I've been unable to find a single review online for their equipment, or their cloud platform. While the offering looks nice on paper id be interested in hearing some actual feedback before buying any test units to bench and play with at the office.

The predominant usage is SMB WiFi and Switches with the switches being used to backbone not only the network, but Camera and Phone Systems as well, so POE reliability is essential and traffic metrics are key for problem tracing.

I am open to other solutions as well and would appreciate any feedback on the other listed platforms or others i have not considered.

Thanks in advance.



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