Not very good news for Cisco in the education market today. Network World's Jim Duffy is reporting of two schools that are switching out Cisco switches for equipment from rival vendors due to what they say is greater feature/functionality from competitive offerings, and lower prices, reports Duffy.
Fayetteville State University (FSU) in Fayetteville, N.C., is replacing more than 50 of its 280 Cisco switches with ConSentry equipment because of the embedded network access control (NAC) capabilities of those switches. FSU said it suffered problems with Cisco Clean Access NAC appliance, which kept going down.
Duffy reports:
The Cisco solution depended on Cisco desktop software to provide that endpoint verification. Clean Access verifies whether users are running updated antivirus and antispyware software, but it doesn’t scan users’ computers for the actual presence of malware on that machine. As a result, Trojans, denial-of-service attacks and other malware entered the FSU network and brought down the Clean Access platform. Also, bad traffic from users could hit the Clean Access server even if they had not authenticated or passed the EPV check, because that server was set up as the default gateway, according to FSU.
While FSU plans to remain predominantly a Cisco shop, St. Francis High School is replacing virtually all of its Cisco equipment with HP ProCurve gear. The school is swapping out Catalyst 4000, 2900XL, 2980G, and 3500XL switches for HP ProCurve’s 5300, 2800 and 2600 switches, says Larry Steinke, director of technology at the school. The 4000, 2900XL and 3500XL have reached end-of-life status anyway, Steinke notes. “It basically [came down to] pricing, warranty and industry compatibility,” Steinke says.
Read the full story, including Cisco's response, here.
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