A new, cheaper version of the 9300 (9200) that can save you some money
January 23, 2020

A new, cheaper version of the 9300 (9200) that can save you some money

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches

After a couple of months of testing, we decided to change our hardware standard from 9300 to 9200 switches for the LAN side. Usually every 4-5 years, we change all the catalysts in the entire organization. At the moment we use 3850/9300 and just started the installation process of the new 9200. As access layer
switches, we use them to connect users.
  • Stacking is still one of the biggest advantages for this series of catalyst.
  • With basic configuration, they are quite stable. So you can apply the configuration and forget about them.
  • They are quite new, so it's rather easy to find bugs in early firmware versions.
  • The price is still too high for just an access switch.
  • We decided to change our standard from 9300 to 9200 because they can offer mostly the same features, but with a better price.
  • We have 90% of the global network running with Cisco and the uptime is pretty good. We are planning to migrate the WAN to another vendor, but switches are still a good choice.
SD-Access is "included" in the 9200 license, but we don't use it since the entire ecosystem is really expensive and not mature. I hope that Cisco will decrease the price list and provide a better and [more] robust solution in the future. You will hear from Cisco sales reps a lot of good things about that, but this is the usual way of Cisco to push for what they want to sell.
We manage the switches in the "old" fashioned way, with a monitoring tool (not Cisco), and actually it still works pretty well even with a small team. I'm looking forward to seeing how this is going to evolve this process since we are moving to advanced manageability in the WAN with SD-WAN.
Cisco is a major player out there and if your network is already based on Cisco, it will be hard to migrate to another vendor from a money and effort point of view. Cisco is generally good, but keep your eyes open for other possibilities. We are evaluating other vendors for the WAN, but not for the LAN and we will stick to Cisco Satalyst for a long time.
In a Cisco environment, buying access switches of the same vendor is almost a must, but sometimes it could be also a good idea not to be locked with one vendor only. This really depends on the company and the environment. In general, access switches are a good fit to connect users and it's not suggested to use them for servers.