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Many, many years of experience with Cisco Catalyst Switches
Updated January 09, 2019

Many, many years of experience with Cisco Catalyst Switches

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

Modules Used

  • Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches

  • Catalyst 3560-CX Series
  • Catalyst 3650 Series
  • Catalyst 3850 Series
  • Other
My company has been using Catalyst Switches since I was hired 10 years ago. We use them for user access, core switching, and data center switching. In the modular series, it is easy to find and purchase any type of interface you need. These switches are extremely stable, easy to maintain and troubleshoot, and Cisco support is always available if there is an issue.
  • Support for several types of interfaces on a single chassis.
  • Hardware and software stability. We have some switches on our network that are at least 15 years old.
  • Ease of implementation and software upgrades.
  • The price point for some of the modular products, particularly in the 6500 series chassis makes it difficult for some companies to implement. So, competitors sometimes "win" because Cisco is just too expensive.
  • We have not had capital to purchase many switches in the past 5 years. While we can't do a lot of "new" technologies, we haven't NEEDED to replace our switching infrastructure because they are so reliable.
  • As for ROI, our Cisco 6509s and 4506s have been on our network for at least 7 years. That is much longer than most technology products.
We are looking to virtualization in 2019. From a scale perspective, by using a Cisco validated design, scaling up and out is quite simple. Newer catalyst devices support API driven configurations, which we will be investigating in 2019.
We will also be looking at this in 2019.
Brocade VDX switches are used in our data center. They were one of the first switching fabrics to remove spanning-tree. Management is extremely easy - as all of the switches in the fabric know about each other and are managed in a single place. Configuration is also easy as fabrics are automatically created when two switches are connected. VLANS only need to be created in one place and the rest of the switches learn them. At the time, the price point was about half that of Cisco Catalyst switches of the same or less capacity.
These switches are so versatile, they can fit into any corporate organization. In fact, there is a 12 port switch sitting on my desk for testing, and I can't even hear it. The larger modular chassis are great for distributing out to buildings with multiple floors and network closets.

Evaluating Cisco Catalyst Switches and Competitors

Most of the time, our Cisco products replace older Cisco products, without a thorough evaluation of other "magic quadrant" network switches. It really depends on what the requirements are. In the future, I would not only base the evaluation on existing requirements, but think more about the future needs and growth of the different business units in my organization. Things like automation, cloud, virtualization, and the road map that each product has towards those topics should be part of the evaluation as well.

Cisco Catalyst Switches Reliability

Catalyst switches are extremely scalable. , using any of the Cisco validated designs. The same family of switches can be used for access, distribution, and core, making the overall integration much smoother. Cisco also supports multi-gigabit ethernet ports to allow for scaling of 1 gbps up to 10 gbps over the same port, using different types of cables, and supports PoE. So you don't have to buy all new switches because access points are suddenly 2.5, 5, or 10 gig uplinks.
We have had very few unplanned outages with all of our Cisco Catalyst products. The biggest issue I have seen is when a device has been powered on for a very long time and it gets powered off and reused later. Sometimes, the switch will not come back up. In most cases, these are switches that are way past end of life. I can't say we have really seen any other issues with the availability of the Catalyst family of switches.
The Catalyst switches on our network perform very well, given the amount of users and servers on our network. We have older Catalyst switches that are at their End of Life, and they are still performing as well as needed.