My first boss told me to always buy the same brand of switches. I did it for 6 years. Was he right?

Elliot Shah · 2026-10-12T13:55:04.376964+00:00

Back in 2012 my first IT manager in Cincinnati told me to stick with one switch brand across a whole building because mixing brands would cause headaches he had seen before. I followed that rule for a small office rollout of 40 Cisco switches and never had a single weird issue. But last year a vendor talked us into UniFi for a satellite office in Columbus to save about $2,200, and now I have to manage two dashboards and can't agree on which side is causing that one random port flap. So was my old boss right, or is that advice stale now that everything talks SNMP? Curious what others do when the budget says one thing and the rulebook says another.

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My first boss told me to always buy the same brand of switches. I did it for 6 years. Was he right? | Commercial Networking - HW Forums