Cisco Catalyst 2960-X/XR Series Switches vs Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches

• I haven't worked on many other brands of routers/switches, but I can say with certainty that Cisco's IOS network operating system is very well written. Using the question mark helps you find a command or complete its options very easily.
• Cisco's Catalyst documentation is superb and if you can't find what you're looking for there, you can find a ton of great blogs by certified Cisco engineers.
• Cisco may be notorious for creating their own proprietary protocols, but for every proprietary protocol they also support the industry standard protocols.
• Cisco Catalyst switches are genuine workhorses; we still have some switches on our network that are older than 10 years and still performing great!
• I like the way Catalyst implements vlans; very easy and straightforward
• I like the stacking capability of Catalyst. it's very easy to configure and you are now managing a single switch, composed of multiple switches

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• In general Cisco Catalyst Switches are a nice piece of kit both in hardware and software.
• You can keep these guys running for years without nary a reboot necessary.
• Even if you have to reboot you have multiple fail overs and redundancies.

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• Cost. Always the downside with Cisco. The competition is cheaper.
• Tech support used to be incredible. It is above average now but not like it was 10+ years ago.
• Better support for third-party cables and SFP/SFP+ would be nice. I hate being warned in the logs that I'm not using a Cisco OEM accessory.
• I wish they could upgrade the stack without taking the whole stack offline. This is a real issue.

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• There are some known bugs that cause interface errors and are listed as "cosmetic" and they do not plan to address them. This makes troubleshooting very difficult to determine what are real errors and what are cosmetic.
• We have had a few batches that get stuck in random reboots.
• Cisco foolishly has discontinued R&D for this line of Catalyst when they were finally showing some innovation that set them apart from other vendors.

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• The organization was able to create a standardization of a single access switch model in our regional office and helped with equipment management.
• We've increased network security.
• We were able to connect WiFi access points without the need for an external source because they are power over ethernet.

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• It's all about making the right choice in the right time. Let's face it - CISCO Catalyst switches are not cheap. But if you take the time to research and design your network the ROI rate will be faster than you imagine. Having a stable and scalable network is the most important aspect of Catayst - upgrading the core and backbone infrastructure allows you to push the older devices to the outer edges of the network or to new, under/undeveloped regions.

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