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