Cisco Nexus Reviews

This solution is the backbone of our data center. It is the fabric to our UCS blade servers.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a focus on backplane deployment, so you can stack more.

In terms of stability, this solution is rock solid. We've had no issues with it.

I would say that to make this solution more scalable, they need to provide a backplane as they do on a lot of their other network infrastructure equipment.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

We have been using the Nexus line for more than ten years. I don't remember what the previous model was, but it had good reliability and everybody knew how to use it, so we just upgraded.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

We used InterVision to assist us with the implementation, and they did an outstanding job.

This solution should be made more affordable.

This is a product that I recommend people look at, but it would be nice if it were more affordable.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

This solution is the backbone of our data center.

We have multiple tenants built on it, in a network-centric design. We have our Dev QA tenant, user acceptance tenant, production tenant, our DMZ, and then our user edge where everything comes in and goes out. We have firewalls in between all of the tenants, and we use ACI to microsegment between the networks, within the tenants. All of the intra-tenant traffic goes through the firewalls.

Prior to our deployment of ACI, everything was, essentially, flat open access. By using ACI we were able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment. At our data center, we are 99.99% virtual.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the virtual switches of our UCS platform. It provides a lot of visibility from the ACI console. The ability to tenant-out the traffic and segment it, without having to get into separate physical hardware or trying to figure out VDCs manually, has been really powerful and extremely useful for us.

I would like to see the usability improved by simplifying the user interface. For example, it would be nice to have a simple way to find endpoints and get information about them. It would be great if they could make the interface a little more user-friendly, but not trade power off for simplicity.

This solution has been very stable and functioning properly, and we've barely touched it since it went in. We've got a big project to start doing upgrades on it, but so far so good. We haven't had any issues with it as long as I've been at the company.

In terms of scalability, we haven't grown the deployment, yet, because we're nowhere near capacity. There is a lot of scalability in terms of what we could use, although it's a matter of what we actually need. It seems very scalable, but we just haven't had the need to scale up yet.

I have not had to speak with technical support yet, which speaks to the stability of the product.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly complex. That's one thing about ACI; it takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but coming from somewhere that had never worked with anything like ACI, it was difficult for me, initially, to grasp the complexity of it. Once I did, I realized that it's not actually as complicated as it looks when you first log in.

We have used a couple of consultants over the years. I believe it was BT that assisted with the original deployment, and it is Presidio that is working on our upgrade project.

My understanding is that the people from BT were great. With respect to Presidio, they know their stuff, and they seem to be putting together good, concrete plans for our system.

I believe that we have seen ROI. We have been able to streamline our processes dramatically because of the way that the new architecture works. While it was a large investment, I believe that it has had a big impact on the productivity of our systems, in general.

There are still a lot of things that we have yet to do with this system, in particular with the APIs and scripting. Also, there are a lot of additional features that we haven't had a chance to look at yet because we haven't upgraded.

Not a lot of people in my area are familiar with this solution. It is kind of new and scary, so a lot of people are a little wary of it. However, now that I've had some time with it, I find it very powerful. Having direct access to virtual switches is a huge advantage. 

My advice to anybody researching this solution is to take a good look at it because it is great for segmenting your network. Make sure that you get a lot of training as part of your deployment, including education on how it works and why the design is the way it is, or what the best practice design is if you're looking at creating your own.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for our new data center.

This solution has improved our redundancy.

The most valuable feature is the HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol).

I would like to see better collaboration with other, low-end devices.

This is a stable solution.

I think that it scales well. For what we use it for, it has been great. Right now, we have a ten-gig network, but it can scale up to forty-gig, which is really good.

Technical support for this solution is great.

Prior to this solution, we used ePlus. We switched in the move to newer technology. 

We have a vendor for products, but we do not just go with what they suggest. We do our homework, in-house, as well.

There are many good things about this product including the reliability, scalability, and of course, security. This is a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution as an aggregate router in our data center environment so that we can have an extended VLAN port between different data centers, regional and local.

The company has multiple data centers and most of the connections between them are through the 9K switches. We also have a couple of them in our lab for testing. These are used to test throughput, the system reliability, accuracy, and scalability for how many VLAN extenders we can have in our infrastructure.

We are using Spine-and-Leaf architecture for our data centers.

The most valuable features of this solution are scalability and throughput. We are extending the VLAN to multiple data centers.

We would like to see this solution support routing.

One of the problems we have is that there is no confirmation for when you try to test a system command. It just accepts it and does not give you a response.

Stability is very good. We have been using it a lot and for a long time. It is being upgraded all the time.

Our environment is very large. We have multiple regional and national data centers, where data is sent between them.

Technical support for this solution is very good. I have been working with them for a while. We have dedicated line support for HTTP.

The initial setup of this solution is not very complex. The problem is reliability. We get help from Cisco technical support and Cisco sales, and the deployment has to be coordinated with the Cisco architectural team to get it working on our network. There are a lot of people involved in the deployment, and before anything, it has to be tested.

We have advanced engineering, where they do the testing to make sure that the problems are being captured. If there are any issues then they are sent back to operations before they can deploy.

We use a Cisco consultant for deployment. They are a reseller for the whole region. Everything is taken from the warehouse, prepped, and tested to make sure that everything is working. Their response is very good, and we have been working with them for a long time.

Our licensing fees are paid annually.

The company is currently investing heavily in new technology from Cisco. This includes the SD-WAN, a network administration system, and NFV for the virtual firewall.

For this solution, we did not consider other vendors. However, we do use multiple vendors for our firewall and routing solutions.

For anybody researching this solution, I would recommend looking at the 9K, but you have to look at all of the metrics and compare them between vendors. This is the way to come up with the best solution. Everything, including technical support, has to be considered because, for example, you can have the product but if you don't have support then you are going to have to deal with issues by yourself.

Overall, this product is good, but nothing is perfect. It is important to have competition.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is as headend switches at remote sites.

These are the same as the old headend switches, but newer and nicer.

The most valuable feature is the Bluetooth console.

They need to offer fibre switches in the 9K series.

I would like to have the ability to identify ports by flashing port lights, so I can tell the user "We need to look at port four", and then I can flash the light remotely using the command line.

The stability of this solution is good.

Scalability with this solution is easy.

Technical support for this solution is good.

We moved to this solution because it is an ever-growing field. You need to stay ahead, and uptime is crucial.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We used AT&T to assist us with the implementation.

AT&T is our primary vendor. Verizon was on the short list, and Cisco themselves was on the list as well.

This is a good switch, overall, and there are only a few other features that we'd like to see.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for the core network infrastructure of our data centers. We use Nexus and the FEX line of products to interconnect all of the server infrastructure, as well as external connections that come in from our outside vendors. 

This solution streamlines how we have to configure things because we can do everything from one device, whereas if we had individual devices we would have to go to each one and configure them manually.

The most valuable features are the flexibility of the blade infrastructure, as well as the FEX integration.

I would love to see Active/Active FEX connectivity, which is enhanced vPC, where we could also do a vPC from a server in that type of configuration. It's still a limitation that's been carried over from the 7K that I'm surprised is still absent from the 9K. Including this would give us the highest level of redundancy without risking having orphaned ports, which we do have at times.

At this point, I am happy with the stability of this solution. It has been better than the 7K line.

The scalability seems pretty solid. We're not a very large company, so we don't max out any of the limitations of the solution.

I have not dealt directly with technical support, although I have received feedback from my engineers. What little support we've needed has worked out very well.

I have nearly ten years of experience with the Nexus 7K line. Our change was primarily driven by the company's requirement to maintain our equipment. With the 7K line going out of support shortly, we had to move to a supported platform to meet regulatory requirements.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The similarities between the 9K and the older 7K helped with the transition. It didn't complicate things because the functionalities are so similar that it was easy enough to transfer our current configuration over. We were even able to make slight adjustments for improvement.

We used CompuNet to assist us with the implementation.

The engineer was great, but the project manager wasn't so great. He didn't really manage the project. I came in late, in the middle of the project, and ended up putting it on hold because there was no plan. They were trying to implement within a couple of weeks. So, I had to put it on hold for about three months before we actually were able to move our core over to the new 9K infrastructure.

With the implementation of the FEX infrastructure, it is going to save us a lot of time. We are incapable of implementing new connectivity for new hardware devices without having the ability to manage multiple devices.

Besides, the ROI for this solution is that it gets me off of the audit list.

We only have a yearly support contract, as we do not use any of the subscription-based functions at this time.

We only evaluated solutions by Cisco.

With the feature set we are using now, I cannot think of any major changes that we would require. In the future, as we move into a hybrid cloud strategy, I may see opportunities for improvement.

There are still limitations within the product.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to make sure that it meets your requirements. From a stability standpoint, it works, but not every feature set that you may need or require is there, so you have to look at it closely.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for the access layer of our network.

This solution is helping us in terms of providing SDN, software-defined networking.

The most valuable features are the access layer security, OpenConfig, and OpenFlow.

We would like to see OpenConfig covering most of the industry standards. The YANG models, for example, and also support for OpenFlow.

The areas that need improvement are MACsec, OpenConfig, and OpenFlow.

Stability is not really up to the mark. There are a lot of bugs in MACsec and OpenFlow.

Scalability is good enough for now, and not really an issue for us.

I have not spoken with technical support.

We did use another solution prior to this one. We have had a lot of different switches.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. For the configuration, we used zero-touch provisioning, so it was straightforward.

We had assistance with the deployment of the solution.

We are multi-vendor, so whoever gives us the best product is the one we purchase from.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to start their testing early, as the features need time to run.

This solution needs a lot more improvement, such as the bugs that need to be fixed.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

My primary use for this solution is bridging servers and storage arrays and networks across multiple domains.

We move massive amounts of data across the network at a time, so the fact that we can do it over a ten-gigabit pipeline is incredible. It speeds up the network data transfer time.

The most valuable feature is the high performance.

I really wish that Nexus and iOS commands were more similar than they are different. Standardization across iOS and Nexus operating systems would be an improvement.

The stability of this solution is great.

This solution has great scalability.

We are a partner, and most of our programs are air-gapped, which means that we don't get to have real-time customer support. Somebody who is cleared has to come on-site to look at what our problems are.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. There is a pre-configuration wizard that will prompt you whenever you connect any device for the first time. It is pretty simple that way.

The only solutions that we considered were by Cisco. We have used other products, for example from HP, but we were not as satisfied by those as we were with Cisco.

If you want high performance and availability then Nexus is the way to go.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.