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Fabric Path well worth the investment
March 29, 2018

Fabric Path well worth the investment

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

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco FabricPath

We use Cisco Fabric Path (Nexus) switches for most of our distribution switches and have been rolling through replacing our old catalyst switches with them. It allowed us to have a loop-free topology that can actually use all of the redundant links that we build into our topology vs. traditional STP networks that blocks those redundant links in a normal state. This allows us to better serve our customers and provide more bandwidth under normal circumstances while still providing the fault tolerance of having multiple links and just slowing down a bit if we lose a link here or there.
  • It scales fairly well.
  • It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
  • It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.
  • We've had a few bugs that have caused random reloads of switches when modifying VLANS.
  • We've had a bug that reloaded an entire fabric at once.
  • FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.
In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.
Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.