Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches vs Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Catalyst [6800 Series] Switches provide good selection of models with various port densities and capabilities. We use Catalyst switches in most location in various functional setups. Chassis switches in Data Centers, stacks of multiple switches at many locations within campus, 24-48 port models at larger branches for routing and switching.

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Jurek Plona

IT Infrastructure Planner/Architect

FortisBC Energy Inc.Utilities, 1001-5000 employees

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Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches are enterprise-class network core switches. They are not meant for small to medium size companies or satellite offices. These switches are useful to provide a highly available network backbone where all of your firewalls, edge routers, top-of-rack switches, and fabric interconnects can terminate on a scalable and secure network.

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Mark McCully

Senior Network Administrator

University HealthSystem ConsortiumHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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Pros

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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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees

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Offer a large concentration of high speed ports, even supporting PoE.
Very robust switches that have a large MTBF.
Support all of the enterprise software requirements.

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Bart Verbaandert

Technology Manager Global Connectivity Platforms

J&JHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

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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Tim Lillis

Sr. System Engineer

Kent Intermediate School DistrictEducation Management, 501-1000 employees

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Software needs improvement, where features are added (Stack wise) or removed (GLBP) without solicitation from a wider audience or depreciation, respectively
Software bugs recently in basic features like AAA
Ability to turn off all unused services or features to reduce the attack surface
Cisco CoPP functionality is not like it was on the Cat 6k platform - users cannot create custom policies for use at the control-plane interface

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Verified User

Supervisor in Information Technology

Utilities Company, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches 9.1

Based on 3 answers

Because they work well at what they do. They are highly innovative with their hub and spoke firmware deployment. Once again Cisco was extremely stupid to stop R and D on them.

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Tim Lillis

Sr. System Engineer

Kent Intermediate School DistrictEducation Management, 501-1000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Usability

Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches 8.6

Based on 2 answers

Cisco Catalyst switches are the standard for usability. The Cisco command line is 1 of 2 formats for a command line interface in the computer networking industry. They literally define the standard for the industry, so naturally the usability is going to be high -- simply because that's what everyone uses. I rated them as 9 because they have some consistency issues within the IOS for different versions/platforms.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

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Support Rating

Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches 9.0

Based on 2 answers

They are easy to get a hold of and are very effective.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

The Juniper lineup offers better pricing versus the Cisco line up but you do definitely lose some hardware prowess, and stability that you can count on with Cisco devices. Also the support is not as robust from Juniper as it can take longer and be more frustrating getting a support ticket going with them.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees

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We ran a proof of concept for HPE and Cisco switches. Cisco won out due to the following:

Cisco's positive track record of previous Catalyst switch platforms we've had experience with (2900, 4500, 6500).
Large TCAM space to support large ACLs used to lock down endpoint access.
Cisco's community is large so it's typically easy to find answers online to questions we have about design, installation, or troubleshooting.
Catalyst 9000 is a newer platform than Aruba's switches that were perceived as re-branded HP Procurve switches, which have been around longer. While we can't say for sure this will amount to better ROI, we certainly felt like we'd get more life out of the Cisco 9000s.
ROI for Aruba Mobility Access Switches was low due to an unexpected EoS/EoL announcement, affecting our campus access switch deployment. This forced us to replace Aruba MAS switches sooner than expected, leaving a bad taste in our mouth.

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Verified User

Technician in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

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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Ivan Tushev

CIO (Chief Information Officer)

UltraNET LtdInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Don't need to buy services - lifetime warranty
Stability - even 10 year old devices are still running and doing the job
Sometimes lines of products are on the market for a very short time (eg. 6800 instant access) - it is hard to buy equipment to make the network bigger.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology

Oil & Energy 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