Huawei Ethernet Switches Reviews

Huawei Ethernet Switches support multiple vendors. You can integrate them according to the network scenario. Their power consumption is low. 

The solution needs to be more user-friendly. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

The tool is stable. 

I have never contacted support. 

Huawei Ethernet Switches' deployment is not complex. To deploy them, you must end the IP addresses and configure the port. 

The solution's pricing is in the middle, but you will be charged when you upgrade the tenant. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We used the solution to connect the SCADA locations of an electrical company. 

We have not encountered any issues in the locations where the product has been deployed. I am impressed with its performance and pricing. 

The solution needs to provide GUI commands. 

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

The solution is robust hence there are no issues with stability. 

The product is scalable if you select the right model.

Official support has some issues in my country. We are able to get support only through backdoors. 

The tool is easy to setup but if UI is available it will be easier to setup. The product's deployment takes a few minutes to complete and configuration is easy. We need to first place a fiber and make it available to all locations. 

The solution's price is reasonable compared to other products like Cisco. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The tool is more robust and has more price performance compared to other products. I would recommend this product if your budget permits it. 

For my own use case, I am a reseller for the switches. For my clients' use case, it is using the products as switches to build out their network connections.  

The most valuable features will be those features that are really considered as basic features of this type of switch. That includes things such as spanning tree protocol, Huawei's proprietary intelligent stacking called iStack, and the routing features that come along with the switch software package.  

Because Huawei does not charge any license fee on extra features I can repackage it. When you buy a switch from Huawei, the switches come along with a lot of features that you do not need to pay extra money for but you can use these features to build out similarly to something like Cisco switches. There are some features that it does not include, so you have to pay some extra license fee to enable those capabilities.  

To improve the ethernet switches, I think first of all that Huawei should improve their knowledge base library. When people like me are trying to look for documents to study about the product to find a solution, sometimes the particular information I am looking for is quite hard to find. It should be an easy task to find a suitable document as a reference. By comparison, it is very easy to locate the information that you need for the Cisco systems. I just type the name of any features or any questions I might have into Google and I can find what I need in a matter of minutes. With Huawei, it is not that simple.  

I think the support also needs to be improved. Right now you have to be able to speak Mandarin in order to communicate with those technical experts and express your problem to make them understand what it is. When they know they can give you a solution to solve your problem, and the support is good in that way it is good. But they need more support for other languages. When I work with Cisco, for example, you can generally speak in English. I am not saying that the support people at Huawei do not know how to communicate in English at all, but find it quite difficult to communicate well with them because they have a very heavy Mandarin accent when speaking in English. It is better to just speak with them in mandarin if you can.  

Because I work only so often with the Huawei brand, I think these might be the only suggestions I have. I spent a long time with the technology but have not gotten very deeply into discovering the smaller details of Huawei switches until recent years.  

I have been using the product for three years.  

The stability of the brand is constantly getting better and has improved over time. Early on, I actually was working with this brand and have experience with it from seven or eight years ago for a short period of time. As I worked with it, I found it was sometimes hard to explain to the customer when the system became unstable. But Huawei seems to have resolved these issues now.  

In terms of scalability, Huawei is catching up to the big brothers in networking. For example, it is doing more to compete with Cisco, i-Tree or Brocade switches. Their scalability is quite good and sometimes they develop proprietary technology similar to other brands, like borrowing from Cisco. But some people say that the brand is just trying to copycat features that already exist in other brands. To copy is good sometimes, but to develop their own new technology is more important than copying something from other companies. It is not quite best practices to steal some technology and ideas from other companies.  

I would say that the technical support responds quite well. Because we are in the same time zone, it is quite easy to find people for troubleshooting or support. Just in case they cannot solve my problem, they can look for other knowledgeable resources within the same time zone who can address the issue. Some other brands, like Cisco, will usually pass the case to another time zone. They work in a protocol which some people call "follow the sun." So sometimes when people are working in one time-zone and they pass the case to people in another time zone, there might be some problem or some information that gets lost about the dialogue explaining the issue. When that happens, you have to repeat the questions and dialogue and it can take the people responding some time to pick up what had already been explained. So it wastes time at the end of the day.  

I believe that the question about setup complexity really depends on which models of the switches are being used. For the middle to low-end switches, it is quite intuitive. But for higher-end models, you must have experience in understanding not only Huawei technology but should also have a very clear concept of what you want to accomplish in networking. So, configuration-wise, I do not personally find any difficulties in configuring Huawei switches provided that I find the configuration guide and read it briefly before I put in any commands into the switch. However, less experienced users could potentially have problems.  

Huawei comes with a lot of features out of the box that you have to pay extra for with other products. They do charge extra in the licensing for certain other features, however, so some of those capabilities are an additional charge.

I have used quite a few ethernet switches. I have mostly been involved with Cisco, Huawei, and Meraki and I primarily use these three brands. It is not really a matter of choosing only Huawei as a solution in my situation. As a reseller, I need more than one option to satisfy client needs.

The advice I would give people who are considering this product as their switching solution is that if you are looking to satisfy the needs of a small scale project and want a pretty good price, then you might go for it. But you might be sacrificing security or risking involvement in a politically unstable situation. China and the U.S. are very tense with their political positions at the moment. They are facing some sort of trade war. If you need some components to produce or manufacture a product like a Huawei switch it is possibly going to be a tense situation. The chips are an important and really a vital component to complete development and upgrades or maintenance. Without that availability, the switch cannot work properly if something happens. So security and material swapping are the major issues to consider as a potential risk of adopting the product.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the Huawei ethernet switches as a five. I rate it a five, or really average, compared with a product like Cisco switches. Cisco switches really rate something more like an eight or eight-and-a-half.  

Huawei Ethernet Switches can be useful for a lot of things, including office deployments, and since most of our company's clients use them for build and test purposes and other things.

The licensing cost attached to the solution is atrocious, so from an improvement perspective, it should be made cheaper.

The upgrade of firmware for devices from Huawei is very hard, but it is not much of a shortcoming. If you don't pay for the license, you will not get the firmware upgrade. When there is new firmware available, a user needs to upgrade it with the help of a manual, which may seem a bit weird and hard to achieve.

I have been using Huawei Ethernet Switches since 2016. My company has a partnership with Huawei.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Ultimately, Huawei Ethernet Switches is a machine, and it does give some trouble at times.

It is a very scalable and nice solution, especially when you compare it with other devices in the market.

Though the networking team in my company has contacted Huawei's technical support team, I have never reached out to them personally.

In the past, I have used switches from HPE, and though I have some experience with the replacement process, I don't remember the exact name of the HPE switches I dealt with, but I remember that it was not a very pleasant experience using them. I also have experience with switches from Cisco and Arista Networks. Switches from Arista Networks were complex for me, as it was very hard for me to understand what was going on with it. Out of all the products that I have used, Cisco and Huawei were the best choices.

The product's initial setup phase was very complex.

I don't have any idea about the time needed for the deployment since I am the kind of person who mostly likes to get the job done by myself. I would only reach out to the product's support team if I couldn't do something by myself.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

There are around 200 people involved in networking stuff in my company to take care of the deployment and maintenance phases of the solution, but currently, the numbers are getting smaller, and people are able to manage the product by themselves, making it a very stable solution compared to the other tools in the market.

During the installation phase, my company dealt directly with Huawei. Huawei helps our company with the deployment process.

The licensing costs depend on the negotiations that a user has with Huawei. The support provided by Huawei is very responsive, and at times, they visit and provide on-site help to users. The support by Huawei is different from how other products offer support to users since most of them provide help through phones while Huawei provides on-site support to users. There is a need to make some additional payments apart from the licensing costs attached to the solution.

The product has a lot of offerings, but it all depends on the needs of the user. I would not be able to speak about the product solution provided by Huawei. If you look around, then you may find a solution that may fit your requirements.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for user servers and websites within our company. 

This solution causes us problems. If you import a different software version, parameters are changed, and the configuration resets so you have to set it all up again. 

The solution is easy to set up. 

I didn't like the Huawei Switches because of the different versions resetting the configuration issue. Huawei doesn't support Layer 3 modes while TOE and ARP have some issues.

We have been implementing the solution for around a year. 

The solution is almost stable. 

I would say this solution is not as scalable as other options like Juniper. We have over 1000 users in our company. 

We have faced issues with the solution that sometimes required support, and we haven't had any problems with the support we received. 

Positive

The initial setup of the solution was easy, it took 20 to 25 minutes.  

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The solution is an IoT router but we primarily use it as the layer for industrial switches for CCTV video transmission.

The solution is very inexpensive. The documentation is very good. 

Technical support is also very good.

They have the ability, since they have a very big R&D team, to create an upgrade for any feature or patch very easily.

Troubleshooting documentation should be improved.

The interoperability of the devices, in general, on the Huawei switches is not good and is known to be not good. Maybe they can improve this a bit.

In terms of being able to patch quickly, if you have both a quality device, a quality switch that has a specific capability, Huawei won't necessarily have the same capability until a patch is created for it. 

I've been using the solution for approximately one year.

I'm satisfied with the stability of their equipment. There are no crashes, unexpected events, outages, or reboots.

We've never tried to scale the solution, so I can't speak to how scalable it is. We do have a client with 1,000-5,000 employees.

We've been satisfied with the level of technical support we've received from the solution. We've used technical support a lot, and it's one of the main advantages of the solution overall.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's very easy. Initially, the implementation took longer than we thought. We set it up over a period of two or three weeks.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

When compared to Cisco switches, the Huawei switches are a bit lower in quality. They have similar properties that the Cisco switches have. Often Huawei brings in the features to match the competition later, and, in general, the overall quality a bit lower. Sometimes, because of this, you might have some unexpected results. The documentation is generally good, but troubleshooting documents for some unusual bugs or glitches are never created.

I generally recommend Huawei switches because although they are lower quality, they are cheaper than other switches. If you compare the price to quality ratio, it's pretty good, which is why we bought them.

Initially, many users are tempted by the idea of getting something that's that cheap. I recommend users to explore and investigate how they will use the switches and what they will purchase. Huawei is both good and not good. It depends on how you look at. If you really want to go with Huawei, then just be aware that Huawei has interoperability problems with many other vendors. In this case, I'd recommend going with all Huawei products to avoid issues.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for user accessibility.

The HTTP features for security are very good. We use all of the regular features.

The software could be more stable. There are a lot of bugs reported for the IS portion.

The GUI could be improved. It could be much more adaptable.

We've been using the solution for six or seven months.

We haven't faced any issues with scalability yet. There was one issue on the client-side where our mainframes weren't working because of a change on the packet side. The solution needs to add overhead to the packets. We have about 10,000 users on the solution currently. We don't have plans to increase usage on the appliance.

We've had contact with technical support and they are okay. The amount of assistance they provide is average. The response time they offer is typically too long and should be shortened. A lot of issues take hours.

We use a variety of switches. Depending on the requirements, we use Huawei, Cisco, HP, or Aruba. 

Most of our IT team members have a background in Huawei, so the solution is easy to set up.

We have contractors from Huawei come and handle the implementation for us since the solution is on-premises.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution four out of ten. The OS, features, and usage aren't great. There's a lack of resources and support. There's also a lack of implementers and very few partners.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its network monitoring system. 

Huawei Ethernet Switches should improve its user interface. 

I have been working with the solution for six months. 

I would rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate Huawei Ethernet Switches' scalability a seven out of ten. My company has 1200 users for the product and we use it 24/7. 

We have a contract for maintenance and support. 

The tool's price is affordable and I would rate it a five out of ten. The prices are fixed with no additional cost involved. 

We evaluated HPE products. We bought Huawei because the ETA of HPE was very difficult. 

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. Try the solution and if it doesn't work out for you, you can switch to another product.