Cisco Catalyst Switches
February 15, 2019
Cisco Catalyst Switches
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches
- Catalyst 3850 Series
Cisco Catalyst switches are used in our law firm for end-user access. We use 48 and 24 port switches to connect end users to our applications on our LAN as well as for them to use our Wan connections.
- An industry-leading vendor, high throughput.
- Top notch security controls.
- Good interoperability with other vendor's network appliances.
- Cisco Catalyst switches are among the most expensive switches on the market.
- Advanced training is required to use advanced features of the switches (memorization of the CLI commands).
- Some features are not available when using the Cisco proprietary protocols.
- Cisco switches have enabled us to deploy the switches and manage them remotely using Cisco management applications. This makes management much easier, without having to telnet into each one to make config changes, thereby lowering support costs.
- Cisco Catalyst switches enabled us to expand without replacing all of the existing network equipment because of their multi-vendor interoperability.
- Stable code and quick bug fixes. Bugs that cause major operational or security problems have been extremely rare in my experience which leads to 99.99999 uptime.
Our firm uses Hyper-V virtualization and the Catalyst switches VLAN support has enabled seamless virtualization of all of our servers. They have also scaled well as we have increased our headcount from 13 to 59 users. As of now, we have not used any of the Catalyst switch analytics features yet.
We have definitely benefited from the manageability features of the Cisco Catalyst Switches. This allows us to centrally manage the switches from one place, thereby reducing our support costs dramatically. For less experienced users, or for companies with smaller budgets, the switches also contain a GUI (graphical user interface) which allows for simpler management of the switch without knowing all of the command line interface commands.
HP ProCurve switches are Cisco's main competitor. Cisco seems to be heads above the competition in terms of scalability and number of features available in the Catalyst Switches.