Cisco Catalyst 6800 is a beast and will run great for years

The reason for going with the 6800 Catalyst Series core switch was to solve the business problem of having non-industry standard hardware that is less compatible with management systems. We wanted to reduce our overhead and allow our network engineers to focus on one vendor's products and learning those instead of having to deal with many.

I don't see a whole lot of time saving in the automation department, as we really don't use that feature of see much of a need as its the only core switch we have. Same with virtualization, as the only thing virtual about this is the VM's that connect through it. Analytics on the other hand are super helpful and we get alot of useful information of the 6800 from our Cisco DNA system.

Customization in the form of configuring our specific network types, names, access, and authorization are all positives. Not sure what else customization can happen with a switch. Manageability is massive, however. That is done with our Cisco management system and we can fully control everything about 6800 with ease and speed!