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Cisco Catalyst Switches

Cisco Catalyst Switches

Overview

What is Cisco Catalyst Switches?

Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.

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Recent Reviews

Catalyst Switch Review

10 out of 10
February 09, 2024
Incentivized
So in our organization, Catalyst Switches is what everything is connected to get on the internet. So in our organization for ourselves we …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

4 videos

Cisco Catalyst Switches Review
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Cisco Catalyst Switches Review
07:14
Cisco Catalyst Switches Review
07:26
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Product Details

What is Cisco Catalyst Switches?

The Cisco Catalyst family of switches includes enterprise LAN access, distribution, and core switches. The vendor says the switches are designed for an entirely new era of intent-based networking, deliver stellar performance and functionality, and prepares a network for the future with breakthrough innovations for security, mobility, IoT, and the cloud.

Cisco Catalyst switches offer advanced security capabilities, scale for IoT, and cloud readiness.

Cisco aims to transform how people connect, communicate, and collaborate. Cisco and its valued partners sell Cisco hardware, software, and services to businesses of all sizes, governments, service providers, and consumers.

Cisco now offers a two-question, two-minute interactive tool to identify the Cisco products and services available to help users solve up to 5 network challenges.

Cisco Catalyst Switches Screenshots

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Cisco Catalyst Switches Technical Details

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Frequently Asked Questions

Cisco's Catalyst is one of that company's brand of network switches.

HPE Aruba Ethernet Switches, Huawei Ethernet Switches, and Juniper EX Series Switches are common alternatives for Cisco Catalyst Switches.

Reviewers rate Configurability highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Cisco Catalyst Switches are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(721)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 143)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have benefitted from a greater scale with virtualization. We have reached a 98% virtualization effort across the organization due to networking changes and from business acceptance because of our proven uptime across our infrastructure. We are not large enough as an organization to look at automation tools and needing analytics on our network gear. We strive to keep our IT group small and nimble which is why we chose Cisco gear and it [has an] extremely well-proven track record of low downtime/outages.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are now utilizing the back plane connectors on new switches we purchase, eliminating multiple management addresses, which has helped. Also we are moving into the ISE and DUO area's with the expectation of having a more secure environment. These will also allow us to monitor and manage almost all of our gear from a single console. We are quite excited about that.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently, we are using custom scripts and third-party software to automate tasks on our access switches, also on 3560-CX. Automation is a great way to streamline your daily work, and with ever-increasing demands and tasks, I would say it is the only way to get the job done. Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX Series creates a stable and consistent access layer for our company and with that unification of hardware automation giving us even better results.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently still in the early stages of planning for a Cisco DNA implementation. Our gear currently supports it, we just have to invest the time in setting up the automation as it does not magically set itself up as some people would lead you to believe. There is definitely a learning curve and lots of work to be done by actual humans before you can automate deployments, switch replacements, etc.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the catalyst switches together with monitoring, config management and firmware deployment tools and it gives us the ability to save some time on deploying, operating and troubleshooting. Stacking mechanism is also very helpful and gives us great ability to plan and implement a highly scalable network. Virtualization benefits are not really necessary in campus networks.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The switch is technological and delivers exceptional performance to our network. We use access topology and connect all access devices like PCs and wifi hotspots. We use Cisco DNA management to improve the monitoring and management service.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I only utilize a fraction of the available features on the 2960-X series switches. In our case, this is mainly geared toward configuration backups and port recovery. Fortunately, these work as expected, and we have had little need for some of the advanced features. They also integrate well with management platforms like Prime Infrastructure and 3rd party offerings from SolarWinds.
Nilufa Hossain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business relies on the Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX Series [Switches] as an access layer because it is dependable and consistent. Because our infrastructure is reliable and uptime allowed, virtualization has enabled us to scale. With these, we can easily connect to virtual servers and workstations. Using automation to streamline our routine tasks is an excellent way to make our jobs go faster. Being able to complete the task has become increasingly important as increasing demands and an increased number of tasks to complete[ly] squeeze our time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are not at the scale to use virtual Cisco switches but do love the automation ability with scripting ourselves, we do not have the scale right now to use Cisco DNA but instead, use CI/CD tools and scripts to provide an acceptable level of automation for our scale and size.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At one site we were able to copy the configuration, then paste that configuration into 64 identical switches, edit each static IP, then walk away with a complete floor of switched machine banks that were secured to the PCI standards required in a short amount of time. That same company had six IDF closets with stacks of four switches in each that were also nearly identical, so we performed the same procedure with fast results.
Gabriel Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Standardization of 2960-X access switches in our region made it easy to manage the entire LAN solution. We created a network segmentation by department type, as well as one for guests. We also created mechanisms with spanning trees to avoid loops in the network and we were able to route between different VLANs with static routing. It is an easily scalable switch and can be stacked up to 8 units. We manage the entire switch park with Cisco Prime Infrastructure.
Om Khard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cisco Catalyst 2960-L Series Switches are designed to enable time-saving automation, greater scale with virtualization, and analytics. We use automation techniques like Python3 (using socket, netmiko, sys, request, telnet, ssh etc, packages), Ansible for device configuration. Since Ansible is an agent-less automation tool it doesn't require any of the login/signup formalities, it only requires while connecting to the device that when login in to the Switch/Routers. Ansible performs with Idempotency, which means it will change where the changes will be required.
May 19, 2021

Cisco Lover

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are still working on automation. So far, we script all our changes to perform them faster. We also have. for example, tools like wazuh, rptg, helping us with analytics, and HyperV with virtualization. As mentioned, the automation part is still in process. We are going through the documentation to learn more.
May 07, 2021

Cisco 2960x Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We do not use the analytics or virtualization features of these devices. We did do some automation using third party software. It performed well for that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently not using these features especially because we didn't implement the DNA center for now. But it is for sure the future and we will use automation features really soon, I think. And it is more and more the case as we switch, little by little, to the Catalyst 9xxx series.
April 14, 2021

Cisco the leader

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Virtualization of our network makes our life easier and we are using it as our core switch and now even in extreme traffic existing switches will cope the network traffic easily. The scalability of the network and VLANs are so much easier in the current environment that we hope that in near future we will easily upgrade our existing infrastructure.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cisco Catalyst 2960-X / XR Series Switches have many benefits. The management is exemplary and easy to configure through the CLI. It has security features with blocking unauthorized ports, VLANs, STP, DHCP, SNTP, monitoring, and others. Everything works great and is easy to set up. The PoE ports are excellent and energize our APs and phones saving us from buying external sources.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have not benefited as we do not use automation or virtualization at this time, as our organization does not require this. In the future, I would like to see these features used, however they are not needed for the switch to be fully functional. Docker support on the switch seems nice, however.
February 02, 2021

Cisco Catalyst 3650

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As we are a smaller organization we have not found the need to explore these features. Also many of these capabilities have a cost associated with them that doesn't make it as attainable.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our organization, we used Cisco Catalyst 2960-L Series Switches for their main purpose only, so I would say we didn't use the benefits of time-saving automation. Of course, manageable switches offered some quick solutions when necessary to deploy network solutions or changes remotely.
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