Sunday, November 19, 2017

At what point should I consider using enterprise grade network equipments?

Among other IT things, I manage a network of about 40~50 users, which I'm sure is much smaller scale than what r/networking usually deal with. Currently, we're using non-enterprise-grade (SMB?) equipments like TP-Link and D-Link.

The company is growing into 100 people in the foreseeable future. We're also looking into digitizing more of the business processes, which means more servers, more VMs, and more network traffic. We're looking into new office spaces, so I'll be building an entirely new network. At first, I was planning to keep using non-enterprise grade equipments, since they've been working fairly well. But after doing some more research, I've been wondering if I should invest into enterprise grade equipments, like Cisco and Juniper. Since I'll be building an entirely new network, this would be a good chance to step up our networking too.

However, my impression of enterprise grade equipment is that they serve much larger businesses, at 1000+ users, ISP, or data centers. I think the needs of my company is not quite at that level yet. I'm sure companies like Cisco and Juniper have equipments that are targeted at my business size. But if my current non-enterprise equipments do the job seemingly well, should I really consider enterprise grade equipments?

Thanks in advance for any advice!



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