Cisco Catalyst 9300 series switches
June 11, 2019

Cisco Catalyst 9300 series switches

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches

Ours is a hospital set up with about 400 beds. We do need to make sure our IT services provide uninterrupted, high-quality network availability to our patients, care providers, and other ancillary staff. We were using Cisco 3750 access switches before and have just migrated and/or are in the process of migrating them to 9300 series access switches. Since we planned to migrate our entire access layer switches to a new platform, we had to choose one with an ease of deployment, and 9300 fit the bill. They provide a great balance of performance and cost. Also, features like more bandwidth per port, and less latency on the network, help us to provide reliable 24x7 SLA based operations to our customers. Cisco also provides a multitude of SDN features, which helps the network team to build and automate network tasks, so that we can spend less time on deployment and configuration while spending more time on the healthcare business, the primary goal of our company. We are planning to use them for at least another 6-7 years, as we have the necessary port level bandwidth to support their end-user requirements. All in all, it's a great product from a great company, and we recommend it.
  • Higher port level bandwidth availability.
  • SDN ready platform.
  • Encrypted traffic analytics.
  • The price point is high compared to other vendor products.
  • They provide bare-bones hardware so that the customer can write their own code to operate them.
  • The price point is high.
We have not started to use them yet, but we certainly like that these features have been added to the Catalyst products, and we plan to use them in the near future to automate some of our daily configuration tasks, etc. They are of great benifit to the network administrators and DevOps engineers.
We are planning to use DNA functionality. We have purchased the product and started to integrate these 9300 catalyst switches to the DNA center so that we can start managing them through that. We would like to leverage the DNA tools to troubleshoot network level issues and get to the root cause analysis as soon as possible to meet the SLA expectation of the customer.
At one point during the purchasing process, we had to work with Arista to get their cost structure for these kinds of switches. They offered switches at a much lower cost compared to Cisco, but we backed out at the last minute, looking at the benefits with the Cisco Catalyst switches, even though they are little more cost to the company.
Cisco switches are used widely in the enterprise network, and sometimes they work seamlessly with the other hardware we have from Cisco, so these switches are the default choice for most of the enterprise networks in today's market. They operate seamlessly with other vendor products too.