Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches
Our organization supports almost 16,000 students and over 1200 staff members across 12 campuses. As is typical for most public education providers, we have a limited budget for infrastructure. Catalyst switching, especially the 2960-X, allows us to easily manage stacks of switches in each closet for high port density, with the capability to run 10Gbps (or higher with port channels) backbone connections.
- Single management IP per stack, one logical switch composed of several physical switches.
- 10Gbps to the edge switches
- Reliable - very few service interruptions due to switch failure.
- SMARTnet can be expensive for continued support
- Earlier version of code had a bug that impacted our environment
- No real netflow capability
- No SDN capability
- Fewer outages related to switching than our previous setup
- Lower administration/management costs for switch management
- Reduced power consumption - PoE has been more efficient than power adapters for all our phones.
We did not do a live comparison, but I did research both. Catalyst switching made the most sense in our environment for several reasons.
Catalyst throughput was higher, I trust Cisco Support and TAC having used them previously, and our administrators have all been trained on Cisco hardware and software.
Catalyst throughput was higher, I trust Cisco Support and TAC having used them previously, and our administrators have all been trained on Cisco hardware and software.