CISCO Catalyst Series
March 07, 2017

CISCO Catalyst Series

Ivan Tushev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches

We are using various CISCO Catalyst switches across the whole company - from the backbone to the local offices. We find the Catalyst family very stable and trustworthy, having little to no issues running them in our network for over a decade. RSTP, IGMP, BGP, PIM, MVR - you name it, we've already done it on our Catalyst! Will continue to recommend to small and medium businesses.
  • Fast switching.
  • Rapid Spanning Tree.
  • MVR - Multicast Vlan Registration.
  • More comprehensive statistics and debuging tools in the IGMP and IGMP snooping area.
  • Better ways to apply logging filters (messages you want to ommit being logged in the system) - based on regex.
  • 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.
  • Juniper EX
Juniper seemed to offer fancy L3 features in their switches, but in the end the Catalyst managed to beat them on the performance tests we managed to make in our lab. Having good experiences with a product/company also has a great impact on one's choices - why would you go on and fix something that is not broken?
The Catalyst family can be adopted to serve in almost any scenario required by small/medium businesses. We are using it in the office; we are using it in our CATV IP platform. We are using it at the backbone. Well, anyone would agree that using a Catalyst switch as a BGPv4 router is not the greatest idea, but hey - if you are not running the full prefix table, I don't see why not.