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Cisco Nexus- good value, but not best fit in every deployment
November 14, 2020

Cisco Nexus- good value, but not best fit in every deployment

Collin Lichtenberger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Nexus 9000 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Nexus

We're using Cisco Nexus in our data center and as an aggregation device, so it is utilized by the majority of our users in this. Primarily, we needed expanded 10G and 10G+ connectivity, and to reduce cost over the catalyst 6500s it replaced. The main cost reduction was the ongoing maintenance costs.
  • Base cost was low (for the 10G connectivity it offered).
  • It's Cisco, their TAC will be available for assistance, they're not going out of business.
  • It has better/more 10G+ speed options than some of the competition.
  • Cisco still lacks a unified operating system across platforms. So command sets are often wildly different.
  • Cisco Nexus still lacks a basic commit, deploy, fallback options to config deployment. They still force you to set a 'reload timer' (or some other [absurd]) remote recovery method. They have deployed this on their ASRs, why not here?
  • Modes are exclusive, meaning if you want to run in CLI mode, you can't leverage any of the ACI infrastructure or vice-versa.
  • While cheap for connectivity, their feature set isn't the best for campus style deployments.
  • It has helped us greatly reduce maintenance costs over the devices it replaced (Catalyst 6500s)
  • It has helped us by providing a large number of 10G, 40G, and some 100G connection options, at a much lower cost than was possible with the Cat6500s.
  • The lack of feature set for campus style deployments have resulted in extra employee work hours to mitigate and/or repair network disruptions.
In retrospect, I think the Juniper EX Series would have been a better purchase for our environment. However at the time we choose Cisco Nexus due to future support of Netflow, the Juniper EX did not and had no plans to provide Netflow data (which was important to our organization). The Cisco Nexus platform 93180 also provided some connectivity options at 100G.

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

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Nexus Series Switches's feature set?

No

Did Cisco Nexus Series Switches live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Nexus Series Switches go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Nexus Series Switches again?

No

I believe that Cisco Nexus is well suited for the massive data center, although it would benefit from some kind of unified configuration tool (stacking/multi-chassis-design). I realize there are tools out there, but they [are] overly expensive and complicated. We have a small data center (but not tiny) and it's difficult to leverage them well.

Further, while we're using it as an aggregation switch (chiefly due to 10G port density) its skill set is more geared towards data center implementations.

Cisco Nexus Support

It's Cisco. It's TAC. Their big sales push is, "we'll always be there". Our organization/region is prone to a lot of turn over and skilled employee retention can be difficult to maintain in different seasons, so having a hardware platform that management can reliably get support for, is a major bonus. And this is one of Cisco's core businesses (unlike say security cameras where some support specialists can be lacking.)

Using Cisco Nexus

In our environment (and especially during COVID and the Work From Home era), I would really like our network devices to be more resilient [against} errors in remote configuration. Having a standard, easy to use, configure, commit/deploy, rollback system should be installed, but it's not there. Other companies have been providing this for over 20 years, and Cisco does this on some of their devices. Why not all?