Cisco Catalyst Switches Reviews

We usually use it for connecting campus switches and to provide access switching to the customer, through which they connect their end-user or end devices like WiFi, CCTV, or IP phone.

The features I mentioned definitely enhance the customer experience.

The most valuable features are the Stacking and the capacity of the switches because they have more throughput. Layer 2 is also part of its rich feature set.

For the access switch for distribution, I would like to see them support 100GB, 40GB.

It is very, very stable. We have not faced any problems with our clients. There have been no complaints. These switches run for many years. They have not complained about the stability of the network because of the failure of a switch. It works fine.

As I mentioned, one of the great features is Stacking. One of our customers bought two switches. After about three to four months they bought another one. They only stack the switches. They do not need to add more switches at the core or distribution, connected at the base. They can stack up to eight switches, and they will work fine with no issues.

Honestly, we have not really faced any problems with the Catalyst switches because the configuration is intuitive. Also, our engineers are expert in this area. Very rarely they may have to open a case with Cisco TAC.

For me, in presales, I can reach the system engineers easily. They support me a lot. Also the documentation is important. There are a lot of forums, discussions. If you have any problem they guide you and they solve the problem easily.

If you compare Cisco with another vendor, they are far and away better, in terms of performance and the rich features.

For me, in presales, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that I'm able to easily access the Cisco website and, if I need any kind of support, I immediately get it from the Cisco team, whether virtually or physically, here in Saudi Arabia. 

I'm not directly involved in the setup but from what I understand it is straightforward.

HPE comes into the picture because they have a wireless product. It's a good product. We definitely propose their switches.

If you need any support you can find it easily on their website, including documentation. You can reach out to Cisco's virtual team. Cisco gives any type of support needed to their partners.

I give Cisco Catalyst a 10 out of 10. It's scalable, resilient, and has rich features in terms of Layer 2, Layer 3, QoS. They have real vision.

Generally, we are using Cisco Catalyst switches for the campus network. We are currently using the Cisco Catalyst 3800 Series switches with IOS XE, and we also recently onboarded the Catalyst 9300 Series and 9400 Series, mostly for the campus network. We also use the 3800 Series switch for wireless connectivity, which provides UPOE, supporting up to 60 watts for the PoE devices.

Performance-wise, Catalysts are so good in the LAN infrastructure, especially for a campus network. But for a data center environment, we mostly prefer the Cisco Nexus series.

Cisco Catalyst is one of the most famous and popular devices for campus networks, widely used in most of the country. They are the preferred networking switches with many features that help eliminate the need for a more complex OSPF. They are also easy to configure and manage. With the vulnerability assessment report, we can see there are more improvements coming from Cisco for campus area network switches.

HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol) is one valuable feature. In the 3800 Series, we have the Stacking feature which enables combining switches to get more bandwidth and produce high-availability. The Stacking feature can also actually eliminate the need for HSRP.

I would like to see hosting multiple applications on the existing IOS.

Stability-wise it is good. We have had multiple Catalyst switches running for quite a long period of time without even a single reboot. Performance-wise that is quite okay.

The way it is being deployed it is expandable. We can add additional devices, so it is good.

I have used support for Catalyst and it was good.

In most places, we were already using it, and we are continuing to use it. We could see the stability was better and it's quite easy to manage. We are also used to it. In addition, we're able to get technical support as well as vendor support.

Setup is quite straightforward. You need to understand some of the basic components, how to set up the basic requirements. Apart from that, it is quite easy. You won't struggle much if you have a basic understanding of it.

Another candidate would be Juniper switches.

The main thing is that Catalyst has been around for quite a long period. Cisco is one of the leaders in campus area networks, so investing in Catalysts, given that they are reliable, is safe.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the

• product knowledge
• support from the vendor and the availability of the technical staff to support it.

I would give a Cisco Catalyst a nine out of 10 because most campus networks use Cisco and it is one of the best campus network switches. Its performance is quite good, it’s seamless, and stability-wise it is good.

The use case will depend on the customer's requirements. Generally, if they want the access layer, the 2960 works pretty well. If they are in the SMB market, we go with the SZ series which is okay. If the primary use case is more on the PoE side, Catalyst switches give the most. And with respect to two-port, the 2960 is better.

With respect to the technology, when we talk about DNA and SDN as a whole concept, that is where, as a partner, our pitching point is, where we can show our edge to the customer. For example, if we are providing a switching solution, it's not just switching, it's a whole solution with DNA. That is where the whole concept of Network Management and Network Assurance comes in. So Catalyst plays a big role in putting everything together and providing a whole solution to the customer. 

Regarding security, with Stealthwatch, Catalyst switches play an important role as well.

When we talk to the customer, giving a full solution is important. From the switching to the network DNA to the security, I can deliver the whole thing with Cisco. That is how I position things when I go to the customer. We don't just go and talk about switches. We talk about the total solution that Cisco can give.

One good feature is UPOE. Another is having a built-in controller, the customer doesn't have to ask for another controller. For example, you get a built-in controller with the C650. And two-port is one of the premium factors from Cisco.

Something I like about the 2960-XR is that you get a lot of Layer 3 features.

One issue is that the competition is giving a lifetime warranty, whereas Cisco has a limited warranty on most of it.

Also, Dell switching is coming up with a solution where you can put your own OS inside their switching infra. That is where they are talking about open networking. We can show that our Cisco is also an open-source. We are open to different switching operating systems if the customer is willing to put it in. We can support multiple operating systems inside the switching infrastructure. It removes the hardware and software dependency on each other. That is where I think there is room for improvement so we can talk about open networking. Cisco should also come up with open networking access.

In terms of stability, Cisco is the premium solution in the market. It has a cost, but it gives you that stability. That is one thing Cisco has always delivered. That is without doubt, from my perspective and also from a customer perspective. They know that reliability and stability are prime features of Cisco.

I really haven't found any issues with respect to delivering the solution. If you talk about security I would give you a different picture. But with respect to just Catalyst, there are no issues. It is totally straightforward.

Pricing is an issue I have been facing, in comparison with HPE or Juniper. The Nexus series is out of the question right now. Scalability is more an issue on the pricing side and less on the technology side.

I will always tell you to go with Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series. That is the one to go with because you never know - any day, Cisco could make certain devices or certain components of a switch end-of-life. That is always a concern for our customers: "Are you giving me a product that is not end-of-life?. Will it not go end-of-life in the coming years? I need that assurance." I always tell customers to take a device that is very new so at least it's unlikely to go end-of-life in the near future.

So Catalyst 9000 is the one we are positioning because it has a lot of new features, plus it is new in the market. If a customer asks, "Should I go with 3850 or the 9000 Series, I will say that they should go with 9000 Series because the 3850 is an older version and costs almost the same. The 3850 has been on the market for a longer time. You never know when it will go end-of-life in the coming five years or seven years.

I would rate Catalyst at eight out of 10, from my experience. I have mentioned, above, a couple of things that Cisco can come up with, technically as well as commercially. All these aspects lead me to rate it an eight. Those technical and commercial differences mean we have to work hard.

We use it mainly for access, as an access switch to other PCs.

The greatest benefit for our organization is that our Cisco Catalysts are quite reliable. We can depend on them.

The most valuable features of this solution are that they are quite robust, they hardly ever fail.

In terms of additional features or improvements, I would like to see more fiber ports, more security features, and perhaps the integration of wireless features into the switch.

It is very scalable, because of the stacking features.

Cisco supports this solution quite well. I like the support from Cisco.

I have always used Cisco. I think it is the most reliable solution on the market.

When selecting a vendor, for me the most important criteria are 

• the competency of their engineering staff
• their product knowledge.

As I said, I mostly deployed it as an access switch, and at that level, it is not complex. If you are talking about using it as a core switch, that would be much more complex. But we are only using it as an access switch.

Do a comparison with other brands and look at their features. The main Cisco Catalyst features are that it is scalable and reliable. These are two things you should look into when doing your comparison.

I would rate Cisco Catalyst at eight out of 10. It's reliable, the features are quite full-fledged, and it's scalable.

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.