My First Taste of Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
June 14, 2019
My First Taste of Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
- Catalyst 9300 Series
Catalyst Switches have been broadly deployed in the university campuses over 14 years. The switches serve the campus network for the office space, computer lab, classroom, library, voice IP system, the building control system, and security system. They are the fundamental infrastructure of the campus network. It delivers the essential networking communication of the university teaching and learning environment.
- Using Power of Ethernet to deliver the network connection for IP Phones and Wireless Access Points.
- Catalyst Switch stacking capability makes it easy to use in networking management.
- Hardware ready for Software Defined Access technology will protect the investment while the business decides to migrate to the campus fabric solution in the near future.
- Make the IOS XE code more robust and stable.
- It will be nice to have full SFP+ ports available on 9300 switch.
- UPoE available on all ports.
- The list price of the switch is almost equivalent to the cost for the previous Catalyst Switch models, which is good for the business financial plan.
- The dedicated management switch port is much easier for out-of-band management purposes.
- Catalyst 9300 is not compatible with the old switch model, which is a bit challenging for migration in some situations.
Automation is a pretty new technology. To be frank, most of the users including my company are still in the lab or proof of concept stage at this moment. It will take for a while for us to absorb and test how the product can do and then migrate into the production environment eventually. This will mean a whole infrastructure change and will also impact the business flow.
As stated previously, we are still in early stage. But we have purchased 70 Catalyst 9300 switches to replace the existing. However, we will deploy them in legacy mode. Therefore, I do not have much comments on this, but through the lab testing and the proof of concept project, we will eventually enable these advanced features into the production environment when the time comes.
Catalyst 3850 switch is pretty solid and stable in our production environment. They have delivered all features we were looking for while purchasing the switches in a few years ago. Since it has been for five years in use, Cisco just released Catalyst 9300 as the new generation Catalyst switch, plus with SDA capability. Catalyst 9300 will be the major switch product to serve our campus network.