* Arista Switches ** Arista switches are great, don't get me wrong, but the lack of PoE support, the lack of stacking, has really hindered their entry way into the campus market, 99% of my use cases are campus switching for end users, not data center, in this market, cisco wins …
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Cisco Catalyst Switches
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
It is very well suited to act as your aggregator / core switch for mid to large facilities. it is flexible enough to really be useable in small environments but costs may hinder that. It has redundancy of power and management blades that does add a lot of peace of mind and security. Really the only reason you would not use a 9000 series is frankly cost and/or real requirements for performance. They have several versions of this model, plus they have an entire set of lines that can accommodate nearly as much as the 9000. Less demand or less of a budget can weigh in the decision to select this particular model.
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.
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.
[The] upgrade process [is] overly complicated compared to NX-OS or IOS. New images and the current configuration need to be compiled into "golden IOS's". If you don't include the configuration, you will have a clean device with no configuration.
[There are] major bugs in every release. We have had to cycle through all of our routers 3 times in the last year for updates due to show-stopping bugs that did not come to light until after the changes were made in production.
[It has] terrible documentation. You have to mine their site to get to any documentation for recent versions of IOS-XR. If you make the leap from 32-bit cXR to 64-bit eXR, then the documentation is more or less non-existent. Due to the internal architecture of hardware itself, technical specs can change from software version to software version, so don't expect any sort of firm scalability numbers. You'll have to rely on your sales engineer for that.
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.
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.
The code for the switch is slightly different than the 2960X series that it is replacing, but still very familiar. It was relatively straightforward to work around this minor issue. The switch itself is solid and is very flexible as well as reliable.
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.
At the time (during 2020 - COVID) there was an issue getting the new switches due to circumstances around COVID with reduced work force, etc. Generally we have not had an issue getting the product in a timely fashion.
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!
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.
In some ways, the platform is a big improvement over our previous IOS and NX-OS devices: They offer version-controlled configuration staging/commits. They have a robust portfolio of network protocols and features even beyond datacenter devices. Due to the use of NPUs instead of relying entirely on ASICs for forwarding, new versions of the software are able to improve hardware performance and capacity. Unfortunately, I have run into more bugs on IOS-XR than I ever did on IOS or even NX-OS (which has a shocking number of bugs of its own) and you have to be a licensing guru to get your order right the first time.
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.
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.
Really, the only issue encountered when deploying the new 9000 series was attempting to copy a working config from an older series switch and applying it to the new 9000 series. Once it was explained that a new switch configuration needs to be built up specifically for the 9000 and deployed were the issues resolved.
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.
When we are integrating the ASR9000 router with other devices then there should be the same device that can cater to the throughput. We can use the Cisco 9600 Switch which can be easily integrated and can handle the speed in terms of uplinks 40G can be handled. Adding to this Cisco DNA Center can be integrated to do the automation and monitoring purposes.
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
We work directly with our vendor/partner who works closely with our ability to pay at certain times of the year due to budget restraints of public education.
Depending on the model of 9000, it can be as simple of a setup as needed, or can be as expandable as required. The units we purchased only had SFP ports for basic trunk line configuration
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
We didn't need to buy new devices when we were increasing backbone capacity from 1G to 10G.
Due to the modular nature of the software, when there is an issue with any running services, we need not reboot the whole device which affects all clients and availability.
