Fabric Path well worth the investment
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Cisco Fabric Path (Nexus) switches for most of our distribution switches and have been rolling through replacing our old catalyst switches with them. It allowed us to have a loop-free topology that can actually use all of the redundant links that we build into our topology vs. traditional STP networks that blocks those redundant links in a normal state. This allows us to better serve our customers and provide more bandwidth under normal circumstances while still providing the fault tolerance of having multiple links and just slowing down a bit if we lose a link here or there.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
