Arista 7000 series vs. Brocade VDX (discontinued) vs. Cisco Catalyst Switches

Core and data center applications are the strengths of Arista products. The distribution layer is also a good fit. For the access layer, it would be more of a niche product.

Incentivized

My experience since I started working with Extreme VDX has been great and everything has been working effectively. I give it 10/10 in performance since it has never failed us during our normal operations. Networking across our company and WAN has been covered by powerful fabric technologies that enhance secure and transparent business operations. It supports both wired and wireless connections with switches that network them through our applications.

Incentivized

I think the most suited ones will be of course, for example, a supermarket where you have more than 50 plus devices because there are like 48 ports in a switch. We can just use a lot of devices and connect them to it. A less use case will be, I think it depends at the end of the day how your topology looks like. If you have a very few devices, you shouldn't be going for these catalyst switches because they are of course much bigger, more processing power and all those things. If you have, again, it comes to topology. If you have the number of users who are using these switches is less than 15, it's less than 15, then you can just go for any other option and not use them.

Incentivized

• The 7304's along side our core network design has provided 100% uptime during the 5 years of deployment.
• The multi-chassis LAG has provided near 100% connectivity to the distribution and access switches.
• Very low maintenance attention is needed.

Incentivized

• The VDX is very simple to configure.
• Documentation on the product is amazing.
• The VDX will interface with any data center hardware; there is interoperability with all the BIG vendors: Dell, EMC, NetApp.
• I have a pair of VDXs running at my DR site that has been up for over 8 years without any issues!

Incentivized

• One of the things that it does well, it's not something major, but there's a light tracking feature that the 9300 comes with that you can turn on the light and that has become critical in a data center environment where you want to help someone to make sure that you're talking about the same switch, you can turn the light on and off something that is not available in other versions of Cisco switches before the 9300. So it's not as major, but it's quite critical when you're dealing with multiple systems and multiple switches.

Incentivized

• The 7304's lack a graceful non-intrusive upgrade method even though they are dual supervisor.
• I would like to see more integration with Aruba's ClearPass and Airwave products.

Incentivized

• I once had a problem with a USB drive and had a lot of trouble fixing it. We can use more documents and a better way to recover the drive. I understand the problems that every vendor faces with proprietary software. If you are a customer, this should not be a problem.
• It has limited commands.

• Functionality. Well, one of the functions that we are missing is a faster route based on OSPF. Other than that, it could provide an upgrade without a hitless upgrade. Well, now it is a very fast upgrade, which is also okay. We had a case when the platform crashed, but that was a specific case. We were happy with this product.

Incentivized

They are consistently reliable and this switch in particular is a very affordable solution. We can place the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches gear in areas that we normally would not place a switch because it is affordable enough to make it justifiable. And because it is a reliable solution, we are confident it will continue to provide service over the long haul.

Incentivized

Cisco by and far does a great job with the Catalyst line. From a layer 2 dumb switch all the way up to ISP carrier grade switching within the Catalyst portfolio. The best part about it is command parity among the various tiers of product. The only differences are going to lie in what features are available per switch.

Incentivized

We have very few is any outages due to a Cisco hardware failure. Some of our gear is exposed to some pretty harsh environments, and they keep on ticking!

Incentivized

No, the packets flow. Sometimes you will see collisions and broadcast storms can happen which will slow performance but that can be fixed and the packets will flow.

Incentivized

We rarely have issues with the product. I have only had to contact support one time since we put it in and that was to see if another vendor was giving me accurate information on an issue I was having.

Incentivized

Cisco Networking Academy partners with many local Colleges and High Schools to provide great hands-on training. You do need to drive to learn the topic. The in-class session only go so far. You really need to apply this to the real world. Cisco makes it easy for business to connect via CLC or Cisco Learning Credits.

Incentivized

My own personal research to get the information I want is very handy and helped me many times

Incentivized

The implementation of the Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches is fairly seamless, especially if you are familiar with Cisco products. We have had Brocade switch gear in place too, and the differences between the manufacturers [are] not a major issue.

Incentivized

I have used the Catalyst 6500 series in the past. From my point of view, the Arista surpasses the Catalyst on just about every front. Originally we were planning on implementing the Nexus 7000/7700 series switches for our core. Though a little more feature rich, it did not provide features we needed that the Arista did. The Nexus also was a confusing and complex platform to work with. Also, the Nexus was a significantly more expensive solution. Although very happy with the Arista switches we may evaluate the Aruba HPE 8400 chassis-based switches along with Arista switches in the future.

Incentivized

I have not had an opportunity to use a similar featured platform in my networking journey. All I have learned is that Extreme VDX has great potential for controlling and managing networking operations in our company. The data analytics insights that we receive from data analysis have developed great planning and decision-making infrastructure. The speed of operation is always stable with high data transfer rate.

Incentivized

We do have other vendors. For example, Juniper, Fortinet, and there are quite a few others. And Cisco is pretty good because we know the workflow, we know how the operating system works. We are much more familiar with Cisco products and we know the support system behind it. So in terms of comparing with others, I think it stands out. It's one of our top products to go to

Incentivized

We are exclusive Cisco at our organization. In truth part of the reason is, with one type of switch and one manufacturer, it is easier to support. It is also easier to give consistent training to our staff in our tech department

Incentivized

• The Arista 7000 series met or exceed our data center switching and routing needs.
• It provided a more cost effective alternative to other products we were considering.
• Implementation was quick and easy due to the simple standards-based configuration.

Incentivized

• We definitely have a great ROI on the VDX cluster at my DR site; 8 years without issue!
• It takes so very little of my time because it has been so reliable, which allows me to be productive in other areas of the network.
• After the transition from Brocade to Extreme VDX, it was a little rocky with the code at first but things have improved with R & D.

Incentivized

• energy costs dropped by around 11 per cent on the access layer
• management has become easier with DNA Center
• ISSU software upgrades and fabric deployments have significantly reduced "planned" down times
• network speed has increased, latency is at an all-time best within our own LAN

Incentivized