Cisco Catalyst Switches Reviews

I was a Support Engineer with Cisco, I used to support customers who were using Cisco Catalyst features.

A good feature of Cisco Catalyst is that it records crash log files which can be used to literally identify the cause of a crash because they have a lot of information. And Cisco Catalyst supports the use of external flash disks for storing of images and file systems.

Currently, Catalyst is completely proprietary with Cisco. They should have programmability options, through open-source controllers.

Also, some features, are very complex to configure.

Catalyst is known for its stability, so there are not many challenges there. Of course, they do have a platform that comes with its own set of bugs, and then the bugs get fixed and then there is a new set of bugs. But it's okay. Compared to other products it is very stable.

Catalyst is a highly scalable product.

Tech support was good in the past but now it is becoming diluted. Cisco used to have a lot of experienced folks, but now their whole process of hiring and training is diluted, so we don't see as much expertise with the TAC engineers as we once did.

Generally, Cisco Catalyst would be relatively expensive compared to the competition, it would be on the expensive side. But I am not involved in the commercial part.

There are a lot of options when it comes to switching products. Brocade offers good switches, HPE offers a very affordable set of switches. But the purchase decision depends on a lot of factors. Primarily, Cisco provides an end-to-end solution, all aspects of networking, from UIP to security to wireless to servers. That factor plays into it.

I would give this solution an eight out of 10. To get to a 10, it should become more open-source friendly, more customizable, easy to configure, and less complex in terms of the licensing.

The last Catalyst I used was for a core solution in an airport. That was a 3850. The previous use case was as the backbone of an ISP. We used different models of Cisco Catalyst including 3560s and 3700s.

When we started working with a regular Catalyst, the 2060, we mostly had a VLAN-based network. But in 2015, I worked with a well-known NGO, World Vision, in Bangladesh. They have around 84 locations all over the country, and they expected that their entire network would be authenticated through 802.1X. They expected that their network would be centrally policy-driven and allocated, that they would have posture assessment, and captive portal. Other than using a Catalyst, we couldn't have afforded to have these features.

In my country, Catalysts are used mostly for simple distribution, not more than that.

There were some other areas we've worked on the last two years. Most of the organizations who were going for Catalyst switches with Layer 2 options expected Identity Services integration. They were concentrating on having 802.1X authentication policy-making.

Recently I have had a little hiccup working with Catalyst switches. They used a few power integration features but I'm not sure they really resulted in much power saving. But, it caused cross-vendor equipment trouble.

For example, if I put some sort of equipment other than Cisco in a Cisco network, where the energy is marked as an option for Catalyst, sometimes I end up with a link breakage situation. This is because Cisco can understand its own structural power dependency and optimization, but it cannot understand the power optimization for other vendors' equipment. I had a really tough time managing the networks.

Also, Cisco has been introducing some software options in Layer 3 switches. I don't find that to be important so far, when there are have SDN options all over the world now. Certain switches are even leaving that out of the licensing option, and they are providing you embedded options so that you can actually use open-source SDNs. I don't believe that this is a good option, that Cisco is actually keeping so many licensing options for Catalyst. That is my opinion on the Catalyst 9000 series.

So far, I haven't really found any lack of stability. The switches are really good. The Catalyst 2960 switches had some issues earlier, power issues as I mentioned. It had more port failure and port damage issue than previous versions. But after we found the 2960-XR and others, they really improved.

I have been happy with Catalyst performance. It's doing better.

In terms of scalability, it's really working fine.

Cisco tech support is really slow. In the time it takes them to actually understand a scenario, we have mostly found our way out on our own.

In 2015, when I had a major deployment, I had an issue resulting from a captive portal for a 2960-Plus switch with IC. I opened a ticket. The call created questions and seven days went by. So I had to intervene in the entire operation, and found that it had a workaround, and I instructed my engineers to do that. Eventually, the problem was solved, but I really wanted to see whether Cisco could solve the problem. So I kept the ticket going and asked them what they were doing, what results they were providing, because there are certain areas they are expert and, ultimately, they can actually tell me what is the better way to do that. But after 21 days, I found that they were not getting anywhere, whereas in 10 days, we had already solved the problem. Then I asked my people to close the ticket because there was no use keeping it open. It was better that we resolved it ourselves.

So I don't appreciate Cisco tech support.

I have been using different switches side-by-side.

There have been certain issues. There was one implementation where Cisco was awarded up to the firewall and Dell was awarded from the server farm to all the servers in storage: the server from the switch, then the Dell MXL blade switches. That was the time got to compare the Dell performance with the Cisco Nexus 5 series performance. We found that Dell's performance was much more flexible than Cisco Nexus.

There was another case where I was using PowerConnect with the Dell EqualLogic. When we purchased a Dell EqualLogic, we had to buy a good throughput Cisco switch. When we compared the Cisco switch price with the Dell PowerConnect, we found that Dell PowerConnect was much cheaper. We had certain Cisco switches already. When we compared these switches side-by-side, we found that the PowerConnect was performing much better with the iSCSI.

I'm not saying that I shifted from another vendor, but I actually use these things side-by-side, considering several situations.

I wouldn't say the setups are really that complex because most of the setups we have done in Bangladesh were basically structured data center diagrams, which we have found from Cisco or any other network architecture. Those were pretty simple architectures.

If you consider Cisco's price with the Dell, you will definitely lose with Cisco. But Cisco has a major area of equipment in general. Cisco has routers, firewalls, NAC, certain video conferencing, Apple phones, and different security solutions. But Dell doesn't have such areas, Dell only has switching architecture.

On that basis, Cisco is still better, because whenever someone is actually moving towards Cisco products, they have to consider that they have certain other areas that they can invest in with Cisco. But if you consider the pricing of a Cisco switch against a Dell, Dell is definitely the winner.

I have used Cisco side-by-side with Dell and Maipu, and I found that Cisco is good. But if you compare Cisco's performance with these two, you will find that Dell and Maipu are not that bad. I wouldn't say that Maipu is that much of a product, but Dell is really performing well in comparison to Cisco.

Considering the performance, I really chose Dell. But when I have to consider that I'll have to move forward on the next project with certain security integrations, I have to consider Cisco. That is mostly the reason I considered Cisco. Otherwise, Dell would definitely have been the winner.

If you are considering going for a Dell or Cisco or Huawei, even certain other products out there, Dell has really good performance, and Huawei is also doing really well. ZTE is there, certain other organizations are there. But I always pitch good solutions for Cisco. I do that because Cisco has a variety of products, and Cisco has an enterprise-class solution. 

Whenever we are providing solutions to our customers, we have to consider security. On that basis, Cisco has a variety of security products. They have IAC, they have good sandboxing with Threat Grid. They have a benchmarking monitoring system. Then they have ESA and WSA. They have FirePOWER. They have a major cloud system security for Talos. Whenever you find Cisco is not actually putting the emphasis on perimeter fire-walling, they are saying "Save your endpoints. Secure your network. Monitor your network." Do surveillance.

On that basis I find, even if you go through the incident case analysis globally, you'll find that most of the incidents in the last eight or 10 years are happening inside a network. We need to focus on the internal user network. Cisco has a really good option, a one-dashboard option for maintaining and surveilling your entire network. So I give my customers a Cisco pitch, for that reason.

Overall, I am really happy with the 2960G switches, 2960-XR switches, but not that fond of 3560 switches and 3650 switches. And I am really a fan of 3850 switch, considering its performance.

AWS Direct Connect.

• BGP
• Familiar CLI

We have used BGP over IPSec to AWS but there were problems with bandwidth. I migrated to the Catalyst C3850 because AWS Direct Connect doesn't need IPSec. We have to use the QoS (CBWFQ) function. I understand the function of QoS and it is easy to use.

It's a stable product.

Technical support is average.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing could be better.

I would suggest looking into the Cisco Nexus 92160YC-X. It has a lower price than the C3850 and high performance, but the CLI is different.

LAN and WAN links in our offices and data centers.

When we started deploying Cisco switches in our new office, we were able to deploy them very quickly. There were no problems at the configuration stage and this allowed us to start work as quickly as possible.

Stability. We have many Catalyst switches now, and they work without any downtime. We work with government companies and we can't allow the business to stand idle.

It would be good if they added some machine learning which would allow us to abandon the rigid rules for processing traffic priorities and, at the same time, save money, because equipment with similar logic (like DPI) is much more expensive.

Soon, we plan to migrate to the cloud infrastructure. It would be good if the Cisco switches worked quickly in the cloud, like their hardware devices. Ideally, they would be like OVS-DPDK, but they would work out-of-the-box.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

We don't use Cisco support. In our company, we have our own support team with various CCNA and CCNP engineers.

Previously, we tried many different solutions but we had some trouble with stability and scalability.

The initial setup was pretty easy. The first setup was not that big and it was deployed in one day with only two engineers, one CCNA and one CCNP.

Cisco's prices are not cheap, but the stability is worth it.

We tried many vendors including D-Link, HPE, and some cheaper vendors.

It's a very good product but the price is high, so I would rate it at eight out of 10. Overall, it's worth it. Cisco switches have rich functionality.

Our primary use is LAN and WAN links for our enterprise network. 

Cisco Catalyst is used to connect all our WAN links to a central data center. 

• Low maintenance and very stable; not much of a problem. 
• It helps keep our network connections in a healthy state. 

• VLAN
• Routing capabilities and security features 
• It can easily be enabled and used as need dictates. 

It has a very high cost, but understandably, due to its very good quality. This is the reason why some customers opt to buy cheaper brands with same/similar features.

Switching environments, as part of a LAN management solution, where the customer needs to build, operate, and maintain Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks for internal use.

It uses many protocols to ease operations, such as CDP and the interoperability of other Cisco products.

Perpetual POE is a valuable feature, because when the switch reboots, access points do not. This helps minimize infrastructure downtime and impacts internals.

• Services should be improved.
• The delivery of the product lead time should be improved as well.

The price should go down instead of up. 

• Corporate network
• IP phones
• Video conference
• Security
• Connecting branches with corporate network

Network has increased stability, security, and usability. Cisco Catalyst has the ability to create new services for users, such as IP phones and video conference. We decreased budgets on the support corporate network and increased user satisfaction.

• Flexible deployment: We can add new network segments without hard work.
• Stability: If we lose some network connections, the system automatically creates new connections between equipment. 

• Cloud services
• Machine learning futures
• Virtual reality futures
• More IoT equipment
• Mobile software

The most valuable features, to me, are CDP, VTP, ACLs, and routing.

These products help me dissect my network based on the users within a particular location. They've also provided me the capability to separate network traffic as necessary.

As a user, I would like to see the Layer 2 Switches to have NBAR capabilities as well. It would be nice if the new ISRs have firewall capabilities as well.

I've been using these products since 2008. I have a Cisco ISR 2821 and 2911, Cisco Catalyst 4500, 2960 and 3750 Series Switches.

No stability issues were experienced.

It would be nice to see these products have built-in wireless access points like MikroTik.

I am sorry, but I always go to the forums and not to technical support. I like understanding the system myself. That way it is easier for me to fix issues in the future.

I previously used D-Link Switches (which was a pain) due to the budget constraints. I switched because Cisco was the best option at the time compared to D-Link.

The setup was not complex. I already knew what I wanted and what I needed to do.

Get the best that your money can buy.

Don't ever sacrifice performance, it will stab you in the back if you do.

Cisco was the best and only option that I considered.

Real-world scenarios will always surprise you.