Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches vs Cisco FabricPath

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for small to medium office spaces. This is not a switch you'd put in your data center, as it misses a redundant power supply or complex failover mechanisms. It does come with port-trunking, VLAN, etc. which makes it still very versatile. If you're comfortable on the console or use configuration management tools you'll get your network set up in no time.

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Engineer in Information Technology

Telecommunications Company, 501-1000 employees

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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.

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Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

Excellent throughput/performance.
High resilience/reliability.
Best-in-class enterprise support.

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Manager in Information Technology

Maritime Company, 1001-5000 employees

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It scales fairly well.
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.

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Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

If you're not used to how Cisco names stuff you might search a while to find the right option.
Sometimes active- and backup configuration can be a bit confusing.
The price tag is rather high. You might be able to save with cheaper brands if you don't need all the features it offers.

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Engineer in Information Technology

Telecommunications Company, 501-1000 employees

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We've had a few bugs that have caused random reloads of switches when modifying VLANS.
We've had a bug that reloaded an entire fabric at once.

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Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Usability

Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series Switches 8.5

Based on 2 answers

We have found that Cisco Catalyst 1000 Series switches are highly optimized pieces of hardware that are perfect for their target environments. Smaller, simpler designs allow for more relaxed network room/cabinet requirements and PoE functionality have even allowed for micro-segmentation of CCTV and VoIP devices in certain areas without the need for additional hardware.

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Manager in Information Technology

Maritime Company, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

The decision for Cisco was mostly because the remainder of our infrastructure is already from Cisco. This allowed an easy integration and didn't require any training. Also, Cisco offers premium support--also in cases of a hardware fault for example.

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Engineer in Information Technology

Telecommunications Company, 501-1000 employees

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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.

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Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Improved uptime
Improved scheduled/unscheduled maintenance times.
Improved assurance for critical business functions.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Maritime Company, 1001-5000 employees

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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.

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Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No