The Cisco Business 350 Series Managed Switches are presented as building blocks for the small business network, boasting an intuitive dashboard, advanced features, and pervasive security.
This is a small business switch, and for me, that means that if all I need is just this one switch, then I am on the right path. I would not want to use this switch to support a couple of hundred people trying to access heavy local resources. It should be used when you have a few dozen devices and/or users and a fairly flat network.
Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.
It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.
We are a big Cisco shop and wanted to use Cisco switches for this application. We knew that we'd be able to configure them quickly and the time saved doing the configuration would be to our benefit. Knowing that we wanted to go with a fully managed switch also was a major tipping point in Cisco's favor. Having used some of the other vendors' "managed" switch interfaces, nothing comes close to Cisco's approach. Having a better user interface will give us plenty of time down the road.
In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.
FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.
