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The Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series was a great fit for our needs and the price was just right.
June 16, 2020

The Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series was a great fit for our needs and the price was just right.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches

  • Catalyst 9500 Series
We are using the Catalyst 9500 as core switches. We have them in a virtual stack and they have been working very well since migrating to them almost 3 years ago. We use them to connect our edges, data center, IOT networks as well as all of the other remote switches.
  • The virtual stacking works really well.
  • Speed and performance have been great.
  • The build of IOS-XE they are running has been bug free.
  • We did have some bugs in older versions where memory was running up on them. This was fixed with new IOS updates.
  • We did see some limitations with the virtual stacking, but I believe they have expanded their capabilities.
  • ROI is high because I know they will have a nice long life cycle with constant enhancements.
  • The reliability I've had with this has been really nice. No need to worry about it randomly going down.
Doing on-the-go upgrades from the web GUI has been able to save me time and the ability to reboot each switch one at time is really another time-saver. I have also been gaining some insights with what is going on the network by adding it to Cisco DNA Center.
We are just getting started with SDA with DNA center and so far just adding it to the DNA center and monitoring has been pretty smooth. We plan to start doing wired ISE, so I believe we will get more out of the switches once that is done. I think this will lead to much great network automation in the end. If you don't have SDA, I think there are some limitations to what you can do with just the switches.
The Catalyst 9400 was not out when we were looking at new core switches. We thought about using a Nexus 9k but neither were as good of a fit as the 9500. Between price and performance it was a no-brainer for us to look at the 9500. We have not nor in the future would we consider other brands for core switching.
We moved from a Nexus 5k to Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches. They served our needs better than the Nexus 5k and were much easier to use. I would say if you had heavy data center needs you would still need to look at a Nexus series but if you want an all-around great performing Campus switch, this is the one to look at. In my case, I didn't need high port density but did need the performance so it was a great fit for me.