Item: Cisco Catalyst Switches
Rating: 8
Author: Ashutosh Kahol

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use these catalyst switches as the layer to connectivity where we connect them to a router and we also connect the endpoints to these switches. Across any supermarket, any topology will consist of any two to four switches, the layer switches and one router. We use these catalyst switches as the later devices in there. All the supermarket pause machines, the CCTV cameras, the access points, and all of these are connected to these catalyst switches.

Pros and Cons

Pros

I think particularly for the 2960-Xs, these are quite sturdy. I believe they don't get, even if there's a power outage out at Cole's, we usually do some electricity work just to do the electricity redundancy. We just power off the, let's say, the transformers and then see if the mains can handle the power supply. So these 2960, these switches are quite sturdy, I believe, and they don't die on us, but I've seen with the 9200s and the other switches, they don't come back usually when there's a power outage or something like that. So we have to replace the power supply units and all those things to get them working again.

Cons

One thing is that these, every time Cisco gets a new switch, they just make an amendment to the power supply, so they'll just put a knob on it. So let's say if you lose any power supply unit, you'll have to purchase another one, which costs a lot of extra money because we have a lot of another power supply units from the redundant, which we can use, but we can't now because they have just tweaked the modeling of that. Which makes no sense, particularly to me because it's an extra money making machine kind of a thing. But that's fine.
Another thing is these ports, I believe they are a bit less of, if I can say the quality of the oldest switches, they were quite sturdy. As I said earlier, the new switches, they're very light and when you lift them you feel it. So that's one thing, which I think the quality or the material which we are using has gone down.

Return on Investment

I'm not involved in any business decision making, so I don't know what costs these switches, if you lose any of them, they bring to our organization. Because I'm just an engineer, I'm not part of the decision making body, so I won't be able to answer that one for you.

Alternatives Considered

We don't have any other layer to switches other than Cisco, so we haven't used any other company's products.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Switches go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Switches again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I think the most suited ones will be of course, for example, a supermarket where you have more than 50 plus devices because there are like 48 ports in a switch. We can just use a lot of devices and connect them to it. A less use case will be, I think it depends at the end of the day how your topology looks like. If you have a very few devices, you shouldn't be going for these catalyst switches because they are of course much bigger, more processing power and all those things. If you have, again, it comes to topology. If you have the number of users who are using these switches is less than 15, it's less than 15, then you can just go for any other option and not use them.

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Cisco Catalyst Switches Review

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