Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches vs Cisco FabricPath

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Catalyst is well suited for small to medium as well as enterprise networking segments where there is a need to manage wired and wireless users from a single pane of glass with higher visibility and control. It is less suitable where the company is only for basic networks to use internet surfing without any client management and integration of network management tools.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ 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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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

Support of VLAN architecture that in our environment is somewhat complicated
Interface well with Fiber backbone provided by third party
Secure configuration and operation of network infrastructure
Uptime has been outstanding with no outages noted

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Verified User

Executive in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 201-500 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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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

The annual support can be a killer for some organizations; buying a hot spare can be more feasible
BOM for units should be clearer for the procurement teams
Firmware upgrades could be simplified for mid-level techs

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Oil & Energy Company, 201-500 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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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

We have not evaluated other switches as we have been using other versions prior to making the upgrade and were also very happy with older iterations of the product. We will continue to use them for the foreseeable future.

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Lochan Kalicharan

Desktop Support Specialist

Mount Sinai Health SystemMedical Practice, 10,001+ 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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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

The switch is very reliable and for that reason, the operation of a business is very stable and without interruptions.
Because it is relatively easy to use, the organization doesn't need very highly qualified engineers.
Because of is high price, it is not so good ROI.

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Daniel García Arias

CCIE/CISSP, ISO/IEC 27001 Administrador de Seguridad y Riesgo & Gerente de SOC

TI-AmericaTelecommunications, 51-200 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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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

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