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We are looking for a firm that provides remote hands on advanced networking support for several device brands. We have some Cisco routers and ASA firewalls, some Juniper firewalls, some F5 load balancers with Dell and HP switches. We want to find a resource that has a pool of engineers certified/trained in the 3 core technologies. The idea would be that they can provide project support as well as some ad hoc and emergency support. We have maintenance contracts, but need a firm that can help us make changes and even suggest design changes. We would lean towards a deep regional company whose engineers would often be the same when we call, so they would have familiarity with us. We have an office in CA and one in CO so US based is needed, but onsite is probably not.

Any recommendations or self promotion you want to share would be appreciated.

@Juniper_Networks @Cisco

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You came to the right place! Be sure you have placed this in the Job’s section as well.

I am sure someone will contact you shortly.

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I would point out that Dell (and HP to a lesser degree) switching means a lot of different platforms. You have Force10, 3 different Broadcom OS’s, their new Linux OS, and if you have some of the old ones you might end up with FoundryOS (Now Brocade ICX). This always gets fun when integrating with Cisco and the fact that 3/4 of the Dell platforms don’t support RSTP properly so you only end up with valid spanning tree topology on VLAN 1 and conflicting root bridges on the rest.

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PowerConnect 6248 and ProCurve models.

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Hi all, going to chime in here real quick to get ahead of the flood. Due to our rules and guidelines for the community, only approved Spiceworks Partners can promote themselves (services, products, etc) in the public discussion groups.

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IT Service Providers, the kind that you are seeking, cannot post in Spiceworks about their services. So this isn’t a good way to find them. Vendors can post about themselves, as Sean says, but the service providers cannot.

I think that I can say that we (where I am) don’t have all three core skills that you need, so no conflicts there. I think that you’ll find that the range of skills that you need are each pretty extreme for an SMB community (SMBs don’t do “real” networking) and having several high end skill silos (like Juniper) you are even into a greater niche position.

Having been pretty active here for many years, I don’t think that there is anyone in this community (service providers) that has the skill set that you are looking for. You will need a network-centric MSP that focuses on the mid size and larger or enterprise markets. The skill set you are looking for is massive and there are only a handful of us with an engineering pool large enough to address that and, AFAIK, none who can fill those specific shoes and, on the very unlikely chance that there is, they wouldn’t be allowed to tell you that they did anyway.

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The IT Support group is the right group, just responses aren’t allowed. So really, it’s just not the right site for these kinds of questions.

The jobs category would only be for hiring internal resources, though.

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Actually, that’s right up SynchroNet’s alley. They have a solid networking group that can handle a variety of platforms.

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If any service providers are here who do have this broad range of networking skills, drop me a PM so that I am aware of it.

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I didn’t realize that Synchronet had Juniper, F5, etc. Cisco I knew that they could do.

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I have Juniper in Production actually (although fazing it out in favor of Brocade) and one of our principals has held juniper certs. That said out side of one community member in England I see a lot of people talk about Netscreens or JUNOS at all around here.

Honestly the biggest concern is the mix of technologies, wanting people actually certified on them all (I don’t think any of our network engineers are certified on more than maybe 2 platforms each with Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade).

In order to handle remote hands on the stuff outside of fly outs for build outs its going to require sub contractors for most anyone who’s still “Small Enough” to give you the pool of consistent people working on it.

The only company I know that can do ALL of this and have field staff in all these places is IBM (But even then they use sub-contractors for most of it anyways, and you’ll get random service desk people).

My recommendation is to get a remote hands company thats embedded (or near) your data center (Nothing But Netz in the IO PHX being an example of a company who offices in a data center to provide this server) and separate out the actual work on the devices at a configuration basis to a remote support shop.

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I’ve had customers with F5’s (and Netscalers, and dealing with Kemp LB’s this week) I’m not going to say I’m on par with the Dedicated F5 engineers at Terramark or anything but we do understand LB’s. (Just had lunch with a customer who had migrated of F5 and talking about moving back to it). We deal with a lot of crazy heterogenous environments. (Dell and Cisco being mixed is my least favorite due to having to use MST or other issues to work around the limitations I mentioned in the above post).

Amusingly, the person who holds the most Juniper certs in our org is one of the principals. He never shuts up about JUNOS. Magnus is trying to get our Juniper EX’s out of Production. One of our ex-employee’s actually runs an ISP/Datacenter (IPGLOBAL) entirely on their gear. When you have REALLY complicated WAN failover etc needs JUNOS can do some really cool stuff. QFABRIC annoys me (I’m a bigger fan of TRILL or some other industry standard if we are going to get around STP. It feels like a hack treating all your switches as one giant stack).

Now that I think about it as far as people in the community running Juniper I want to say the Spicetrainer in SA runs them for his edge.

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In theory its the right group in that you can point out other IT support providers you just can’t directly talk about yourself except your limits. (which is strange, and is going to favor the handful of service providers who know each other or have had employees work for each other and are aware of their skill sets).

I call it the Kooler rule. You can talk about yourself, just nothing positive. Didn’t realize this now applied to people looking for general services (Previously we’ve been able to at least say “Yah we can do that”).

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Thanks everyone for the responses. It sounds like I need to toast this post in this group anyway. I’ve posted elsewhere, so maybe someone has an experience to share that isn’t self promotion.

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I hear there are Message Boards out there were service providers and potential customers can live in harmony and have discussions :slight_smile:

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Free bit of advice. Pick a brand and work with that. Techs and engineers usually pick a specialty to work on and learn. they may learn a second of the big 3 but. generally they are product focused to give the best possible support on that specific line of gear.

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Datacenters grow organically. One regime is cheap and buys Dell, Another needs some advanced feature and goes Juniper, and another is Cisco certified and feels its the safe choice and goes that route. Someone has a HPC cluster need for fast, dumb and cheap and goes Arista. Given that some gear like switches can have 20 year service life’s (6509) ripping and replacing to keep one vendor end to end can be very expensive. When it comes to high end enterprise gear sticking to one brand is expensive and painful (Cisco’s Load Balence gear was always garbage, and they abandoned the product line). Dell’s only edge/router firewalls are SonicWall (something no one seriously runs in the enterprise). Now there are some advantages to being end to end single vendor (like when running an ethernet fabric with TRILL which no one supports clean Interop and in some cases I’d argue have different religious views of what/how its supposed to work).

For the access layer I like Cisco, for the TOR/Core I like Brocade, for the edge I like either ASA’s or Palo Alto if you need layer 7, for LB’s F5’s are the gold standard (especially if your doing stuff like VDI that they tie into heavily) and for IPS/IDS I pick anything but Cisco. Picking one vendor for all of these network services would even make a die hard Cisco shop go crazy.

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Oh come on, the ACE modules weren’t bad! CSM and CSS before that though… yikes.

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More the physical “'unning a Physical Server on a 6509 blade” that always angered me. The whole “Turning software into an appliance thats just a bog standard windows/linux/unix appliance” always angered me. It means I have to have one off backup and other management concerns for it. It means scaling it means rip and replace. It means ONLY that vendor can handle hardware replacement (I like to keep the datacenter access list small).

It when your running AA.com using F5 clusters or something crazy, but 95% of the cases where I’m dealing with Load balencers, a beefy Virtual machine can reverse proxy just fine (in fact stupid simple nginx reverse proxy’s with adequate CPU generally crush fancy hardware appliances). I understand the IPS aspects of that, but security isn’t something I like done inline (and the openflow magical overlay network future) security should be something that does mirroring, or sampling etc, but having every single packet flow through is inefficient (it should approve the flow then move on), risk prone (I have something physically that can die and kill a link) and expensive (hardware only, painful to scale out etc).