Adtran NetVanta - Perfect Middle of the road Cost to Performance switches
Rating: 9 out of 10
January 09, 2019
Vetted Review
2 years of experience
We both use Adtran NetVanta Switches in house, as well as deploy and re-sell the NetVanta series of switches to our clients and customers. The switches offer high performance, high reliability, and excellent versatility for L2 and L3 switching comparable to Cisco at a more affordable price point in many situations. Their CLI structure is mostly standard and does not take much to learn, and the switch's GUI is fairly powerful and easy to navigate for many simple tasks as well.
- High powered switches capable of large amounts of traffic.
- More than enough power for PoE applications built into the switches allowing for stable power draw across all ports.
- Easy to understand CLI and GUI.
- Built-in USB Interface on 1550 series for Serial Console works well with a downloadable driver.
Cons
- PoE can be a little slow to initiate as the switch communicates with the device to determine the proper power level.
- 1550 Series seem to come flashed with a non-standard Firmware initially that must be upgraded before any configuration can be done.
- USB Driver for 1550 Series USB Serial connection is a non-standard driver that must be downloaded from Adtran vs Windows Plug and Play.
- High Performance and reliability have allowed for a 'set it and forget it' type installation, giving greater customer satisfaction.
- The price point of the switches, while higher than other models such as HP or Dell potentially, is in line with their reliability and functionality and comes in less than Cisco much of the time.
- Having a long time relationship with Adtran as a company has allowed us to quickly assist customers with their needs, saving everyone time and money.
Adtran offers a higher feature set, reliability, and ease of use for advanced features compared to Dell, Ubiquiti UNIFI/Edge, and HP ProCurve counterparts - but at a higher price point. While Ubiquiti is a leader in Prosumer products in terms of price and reliability overall and ease of use, their feature set is lacking, comparatively speaking, for some specific L3 routing and other advanced features. Dell and HP, in my personal experience, have not had the same reliability, nor the same ease of use within their CLI or GUI.