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Why Coveo chose Cisco Nexus for its core network
August 31, 2017

Why Coveo chose Cisco Nexus for its core network

Marc-Olivier Turgeon-Ferland | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Nexus

We use 2 Cisco Nexus as our core switches for our datacenter location. The servers in this location are that is left of our on-premises infrastructure. We wanted Nexus because we wanted something that was able to manage multiple 10Gbps links and we wanted something with renowned reliability.
  • Redundancy when used in cluster
  • Configuration syncing when using a recent firmware
  • Reliability
  • Config syncing when using firmware that came with it
  • Fixing config sync problems
  • Understanding how Nexus clusters work
  • Understanding how to setup Nexus clusters
  • Inability to use some Cisco branded SFP because of firmware version
  • Inability to use some Cisco branded SFP because of "hardware" incompatibility even though the same SFP was working fine in Dell products
  • I cost us a lot of human time at first because of the steep learning curve to understand and setup the switch in cluster.
  • Since initial setup, our core has operated without any incident and did not need admin intervention.
  • Since we are 10Gbps between most of our servers, we diminished migration times of VMs between servers and backup times.
  • Our users do not bottleneck at the network level when using the network shares anymore.
  • Dell Switches, Broadcom Switches and HP Switches
We had a really good deal on the Cisco which helped a lot when making our choice, but we mainly wanted reliability and the ability to update/reboot one of the switches in a cluster configuration (not a stack).

Dell was still lower in price, but we wanted a renowned brand known for its reliability. HP would have been a good choice also, but the price wasn't near Cisco and we considered them equivalent in reliability.

Our distribution switches are also Cisco so that meant fewer points of contact for us in case of problems and also similar CLI commands.
It is really well suited if you need an always-up core switch and still want to sometimes update/reboot one of the switches.

I don't think that for this price Cisco Nexus is well suited for standalone use except maybe if you use all the 10Gbps ports as it is a symmetric backbone.