The speed of the hardware (to a point) is the easy part.Īll of the above tends to translate into implementations that are simpler and operations that are more repeatable. It is -much- harder to build a truly solid L2/元 implementation than a lot of folks give credit for. In contrast, open source networking has an equally devoted - but much smaller - community. In the case of open source operating systems and mainline apps (databases, web servers, dev tools, etc) there is a community of many hundreds of thousands of developers contributing - many with the backing of commercial organizations with substantial resources. It's no accident that the configuration methodologies and compatibility tests for many of these tools tend to reference Cisco gear. The open source routing software offerings (Vyatta, Quagga, etc) are really impressive in terms of how far they have come, but the basic fact is that their utility is judged in some significant part by how they compare in terms of features and stability to the commercial offerings. You pay extra to keep from having the small office calling and yelling about unknown failures or difficulties in using it.Īlso the dedicated units usually have warranties and service support. In the long run unless there's staff for maintaining it the added cost of a dedicated unit is generally a peace of mind tax. It may get re-appropriated by staff thinking it's just a computer that's unused, or powered off, unless someone is there to slap hands away or make sure a big note is taped to the front. PC's are more flexible, but have moving parts (and more points of failure) and have lots of features that either aren't fully used or needed or are confusing for them to use (without an administrator in-house). For small offices, a full PC may be overkill if they don't have an administrator or dedicated company with short response time to administer it.ĭedicated units, once configured, are lower power, no moving parts, are reset by power cycling and generally "just work" at that point.