Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches vs Cisco FabricPath

Likelihood to Recommend

Even with the higher price point compared to other vendors, we highly recommend [Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches] to all of our clients. These switches are built to last. [They] make network management very easy and will benefit any business in the long run. Cisco stands behind its product. It is very easy to add additional switches as a network grows.

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Technician in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 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

Cisco Catalyst Switches are very easy to use and manage.
Cisco support it top notch.
Very easy to scale up as [the] network infrastructure grows.

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Michael Kerzner

Lead Systems Engineer

Nettology, LLCInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 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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Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Programming is different from other providers; this has caused some issues with staffing
The training opportunities do not provide the basics of programming or migration from other vendors' products.
Unless you are willing to purchase renewed switches, cost can be out of line with other vendors

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Verified User

Executive in Information Technology

Government Administration 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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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

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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Alternatives Considered

Cisco is top of the class when it comes to comparing them to other vendors in the network hardware environment. They may have a higher price-point, but they justify it with great support and a very long lifecycle.

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Michael Kerzner

Lead Systems Engineer

Nettology, LLCInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 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

[There is a] high price point, but [Cisco Catalyst Series Switches] will save [you] in the long run because these switches are reliable and last a very long time.
Cisco offers very good support so you can depend on them to keep everything running smoothly.
Once techs are trained on Cisco devices, they will be able to save time making changes to networks.

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Matt Raup

Senior Help Desk Technician

NettologyInformation Technology & Services, 11-50 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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Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches vs Cisco FabricPath