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Catalyst Switches work great.
Updated June 27, 2023

Catalyst Switches work great.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Cisco Catalyst 2960 X/XR Series
  • Cisco Catalyst 3650 Series
  • Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series
  • Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches

We use catalyst switches in our access, distribution, and core. We run an enterprise mpls network and can easily provide isolation and segmentation with this design. The switches have been stable and have performed great for us.
  • MPLS
  • Switching
  • Routing
  • Traffic visibility with MPLS
  • Upgrades
  • Network has been highly available

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Switches go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Switches again?

Yes

The switches are well suited for large campus deployments, because they a feature rich and can be used in a variety of designs. They are less appropriate is data center deployments because of large data and lack of advance queuing.

Using Cisco Catalyst Switches

We use Catalyst switches in our core, distribution, and access layers. All business functions use these switches since they all connect via these switches. Since we run MPLS on our switches, virtualize and isolate the different business function into their own VRFs.
20 - We have various levels of skills on our staff. We have some Network Engineers with 15+ years of experience all the way to others with only around 2 years of experience. The more experienced staff makes the design and configuration standards decisions while the less experience engineers typically do day-to-day work such as port changes, OS upgrades, and minor changes.
  • Network Isolation
  • Centralized Security Policies
  • User Experience Metrics
We are happy with our experience with Catalyst switches; however, when it is time to refresh our equipment, we do a comparison to other players in the market. Catalyst has met our needs but if another switch or vendor has a better product or solution and a comparable price point, we could move away from Catalyst.

Cisco Catalyst Switches Implementation

We upgraded from an older catalyst model to a newer one. The implementation was pretty much seamless as the newer switches supported all the features as the old ones. These features included OSPF, HSRP, MPLS, LDP, MP-BGP, etc. One issue we say with the newer switches was that the buffers needed to be tuned. The default settings were dropping packets to a slower link. Once we change the 'qos softmax' command settings, we were able to resolve that issue.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - Due to the size of our network, our deployment is broken up into phases based on location. We initially deploy to our small or less utilized locations so we can verify the design and the hardware work as expected. This also help find any gotchas. Once it has been deployed successfully in these locations, we deploy to or larger and more mission critical locations as quick as we can according to our maintenance windows.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - Change management was a minor issue due to the fact that we had to wait for certain windows to deploy the devices. Because we used Catalyst switches in the past, we were able to replace the old device with little to no disruption because the configuration and operations are almost identical between the old switches and the new switches.
  • Hardware lead times
  • Change management