Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches Review
December 11, 2023

Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches

9300 Series Catalyst Switches, the access switches, deploy at small offices where clients basically patch into them and our switches connect to our routers, which in turn connect to the wide area network providers to ISP providers.
  • First of all, they're incredibly reliable. I must admit, I can't recall ever asked losing a switch, which is a wonderful thing. And also I like the fact that you can stack multiple switches basically, logically they act as one switch, but physically there are a bunch of switches that you connect together. And the solution seems pretty neat and it just works.
  • I think the actual upgrades of the switches can be improved because there is a bit of downtime when that happens. In other words, there is an outage to clients' connections whenever we upgrade a switch, provided that the software that we're loading needs to be rebooted. So I think there is a neater way of doing it rather than rebooting the whole stack, which takes out the whole switch. Because of that, we're forced into doing the upgrades after hours outside of business hours. So improvements into getting that process a bit neater would be a good thing.
  • Well, the main objective of these devices is to facilitate communication for our clients. So they're definitely fit for purpose as they say. So they deliver what we expect out of them. Basically, they never fail the performance that we get out of them, it's exactly what we expected. So obviously they perform really well, but the ultimate measure of how well the whole network performs is how well the whole network is engineered. But looking at only these 9300s they certainly are doing their part. They're doing a great job.
Unfortunately, I don't think we use a lot of the automation additional features that these devices may be capable of. We just basically running for the basic functionality that they have, which is switching.
No, we don't use a lot of customization, just a basic setup, basically access switches and they're only used for that purpose.
Well, we've used the previous model of Cisco switches, which were 3850s, 2960s, and they performed in a similar manner, really reliable. But they needed to be updated and we've done that. Obviously we're now running the next generation 9300 series switches.

Do you think Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches again?

Yes

Well, obviously as what Cisco recommends, those are access layer switches, which means those are the switches that clients directly connect to. They're not the ones they use for routing. For that, we use routers.