Cisco Nexus Reviews

We were doing a data center migration. We extended the network from the previous location to the new location. We had about 90% of the applications work seamlessly.

Cisco Nexus helped us do an entire data center migration in under six months. The solution allowed us to be able to do that under time and budget constraints.

For a very small subset, Cisco Nexus caused port flapping within the applications, which was weird. Call it an outage. It was one specific application, i.e. because of the way the application was routed through the switches which couldn't be handled that way. 

We had the good side because 90% of it works flawlessly. We didn't have to repeat IP everything. We didn't have to go through and take everything down. We just migrated it. But that one small subset went haywire.

The stability of Cisco Nexus is excellent.

The scalability of Cisco Nexus is excellent.

Cisco customer support is very good. We have very good technical support from Cisco. They get back to you in time, usually within four hours.

The setup is straightforward. I'd like to see the firmware and code upgradability to be slightly more intuitive. We are buying a new line of data center products from Cisco.

Our implementation and setup were directly from Cisco. The experience was very good. When we had a problem or needed them on the phone, they were right there.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Nexus at a ten. For the scalability, ease of use, and the way that we were able to deploy it to the data center: it worked. It was something very steady. 

Just go with it and make sure that you have your partners lined up.

We use Cisco Nexus on our server-side. We use the product for the access switches layer. We basically take a look at the actual DNA center, however, it will be a time until we will implement the agent from Cisco again.

The solution is very easy to use.

It can implement with 40-gigabit plus technologies and gives us enormous speed. What was the one gigabit per second ten years ago, is now 10 gigabits per second. The future is likely to be 400 gigabits per second. Cisco is on its way there.

The huge capacity of Nexus is excellent.

All the frames are managed on the assets, not on software, which makes things easier. It is essentially dedicated circuit hardware, an integrated circuit for certain tasks.

We can see the functionality of the switches. The policies are very clear.

The mean time between failures and TBF value is very, very high on Cisco Nexus.

The initial setup is quite simple and straightforward.

I'm not in a good position to comment on what might be lacking. I just use the Nexus switches, and I'm very happy to use the machines.

A lot of technologies and features are present on Cisco Nexus and I haven't had a chance to dive into all of them just yet.

We had some issues, strange issues with our firewall from Cisco, however, we resolved them with Cisco. They were very, very strange issues indeed. However, they seem to originate only on our site, and not from Nexus. From my point of view, I've never seen in 20 years, a single breakdown.

They should work to make the pricing more reasonable for the local market.

The stability is excellent. I haven't witnessed a breakdown. Cisco is very reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is excellent.

The solution can scale. We use it for a rather large organization.

We have just over 4,000 employees and around 20,000 active ports. Our operation is big enough that it spreads over half of Romania.

The support on offer is excellent. Everyone is helpful and responsive. We get the answers we need and support is full of ideas in terms of how to tackle issues. We're quite satisfied with them overall.

The initial setup is not too diffcult. I wouldn't describe it as complex. It's quite straightforward to execute. We simply program it over the CLI, command-line interface, and it's pretty easy to do.

The pricing is a little bit high, however, we didn't use all the facilities and when we pay for a license, we pay a lot. That said, we only use a little bit from those licenses. In the local market, this solution is considered pricey. It might be fair pricing from the point of view of Cisco, however, it may be too high from the point of view of Romanian companies.

Right now, we should upgrade our wireless LAN controller, the controller WLC, and that means that we should switch to another assembly controller and we will lose all the licenses that we already have on the actual WLCs. It's not an easy decision.

In general, Cisco products are excellent and we've been really happy with them.

I'd rate the solution, on a scale from one to ten, at a perfect ten.

This solution is used in our data center. It is our layer-two switches that connect all of our servers to the data center firewall. Our data center is a little bit different than most in that we're only layer-two in the data center.

We have increased the throughput of our datacenter. Where before we had switches that were two, one-gig LAG uplinks, we now have eighty-gig. This means that the underlying, layer-two network is not going to be the bottleneck of our data center anymore. It's going to be the other peripherals like our F5 and our Palo Alto that need to be upgraded to provide more throughput.

We leverage Cisco DCNM a lot, which allows us to automate. We're working toward allowing the server administrators to configure their own ports for their new servers that they're spinning up in the data center.

Our only complaint is about the licensing because it can always be a little more cost-effective.

The scalability of this solution is great. We couldn't afford to buy the ASIC solution, so we bought the Nexus 9Ks and put them in a Spine-and-Leaf topology. We then made each of the leaves their own vPC peers as well, so it allows us to have redundancy between servers.

Our local Cisco engineer was amazing during the whole process. He assisted us many times when installing and configuring the system. He also gave us advice on DCNM and how to set it up.

We've opened one tech case where we had to replace a switch because we believed there was a port that was bad. We had the new switch within one business day, so technical support has been awesome. 

We had Cisco switches in our data center that were reaching their end-of-life in a few years. We also had other vendor switches that were coming up on end-of-life, and we as a team, with our manager, decided that we wanted a one-vendor solution. It would make troubleshooting a lot easier because we wouldn't be opening up multiple tech cases to solve problems. Cisco provided the best solution for us.

The initial setup of this solution was only complex because we didn't have Nexus switches in our data center. We had a multi-vendor data center and the Cisco switches that we did have in there were the Catalyst series. So, it was only complex for us because we were learning a new platform. After we got through the learning phase, it was very simple and easy to set up.

We handled the implementation in-house and asked our local Cisco engineer for help when needed.

We have a three-year subscription for our licensing fees. For us, this product is perfect for what we need and it came at the perfect price point.

Arista and Juniper were both on the shortlist. We bought a few Juniper QFX series switches, and we did not like the product at all. We were investigating Arista, but Cisco came in with an awesome pricing plan for us, and a data center solution that met our needs. It was a lot cheaper than Arista, which is why our manager went with that selection.

This product has absolutely surpassed our expectation of throughput. The network team used to be blamed for slowness in the data center, but now we can confidently say that it has nothing to do with us. We're providing the organization with eighty-gigs of throughput in all directions to the firewalls. Troubleshooting poorly-performing applications is easier now because we can say that the bottleneck is not in the data center. 

We could be doing much more with our Nexus 9K switches, but they are not doing as much as they are capable of because we only have layer-two in our data center. This is the way our data center was set up and how the executive team wants it to be run. In larger data centers and larger companies, they're using the full capabilities.

My recommendation for anybody who is researching this solution is to ask for a demonstration from your local Cisco support. We had an awesome support engineer who did a demo with us. He brought in four switches and set up DCNM. We got to see the benefits of how DCNM would help us. We're transitioning to more automation because we have fewer people than we did, so the DCNM product is awesome. It used to be a twenty or thirty-minute process to add a VLAN in our data center, and now it takes approximately three minutes. The Cisco DCNM and the 9K switches were the beginning, to show what we can start doing as a network team to leverage the technology that we have.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is the implementation of the test data center integrated with ICI and some tools to manage data centers. The network architecture includes configuring the chassis of many virtual switches in the same physical chassis and connecting with management tools.

The seamless integration of Nexus in the data center provides a scalable and stable solution. It enhances the management infrastructure, making it preferable for many clients.

The most valuable feature of Nexus is its high throughput with no latency. This is why most clients prefer to integrate Nexus into their data centers. It is very scalable due to the ability to configure numerous virtual switches within the same chassis. The solution is also very stable, making it highly preferable for data centers, particularly in banking. The integration capabilities with various tools for management further amplify its utilities.

The interface integration of Cisco Nexus with AI can be improved for better infrastructure management. Also, the price is very high, though the solution's stability might justify this cost.

I have used the solution for about five years.

The solution is very stable. This stability is one of the key reasons many banks choose to implement it in their data centers.

The system is very scalable, allowing for various configurations in connection with other management tools.

During the first installation, no additional support was needed thanks to Cisco's comprehensive guide.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. One person can manage most configurations. However, depending on the size of the chassis, two people may be required for physical installation.

The return on investment is high over five to six years due to the solution's stability and ease of configuration.

The setup cost is very high. The overall cost of ownership is low, allowing for easy configuration and integration, significantly benefiting long-term use.

If compared to other platforms, Nexus stands out in switching capabilities. Palo Alto is superior for firewall solutions, however, in switching, Nexus is unmatched.

I would rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

The pros of the Cisco Nexus are the simplified integration with the data center and the end platform before building a data center.

Our primary use case of this solution is for the data centers. 

This product has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the rack-based design allowed us to eliminate chassis-based designs. The chassis design is more complicated to manage and maintain in field operations.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of management.

I would like to see network function virtualization with no hardware.

I would like to see the integration of the products into something where it's seamless where an engineer never touches the switch again, never does CLI and you move to an application based network organization.

The stability of the solution needs to get a better handle on the vulnerability in recent code releases that aligns better with the DCN product. We'd like to avoid the need for continual upgrades and potential outages in our data centers and having to reboot the switches for each OS upgrade.

Cisco Nexus is stable, but then, in February of 2017, a cyberwar started. Cisco is getting hammered and we're seeing that evidence in very frequent updates to the OS system. If you have six data centers or you've got multiple locations around the world, these efforts take many months to update successfully to every device. 

When it takes us multiple months and two or three releases in the middle, we invest a lot of money in maintaining the device. The hacker community is the issue. 

The scalability is fine. 

The solution's technical support is used by my architects. I don't use it personally. 

The way that our airline works, because we've recently been in a merger, is that we're putting two big airlines together. Our primary driver has been the end-of-service lifecycle and the ability to remain PCI compliant. We must also remain compliant with cybersecurity.

We typically wait until the end of service life. As we practice this, we end up doing these refreshes and adding new architecture. We're making decisions now based on features, functionalities, and outcomes for passengers getting on planes to improve their experience.

We initially started a couple of years ago with Cisco Nexus. We started the design with 9Ks and 5Ks, we ended up reevaluating the situation features and going with more 2Ks to lower the costs for what we need. 

For the deployment, we used our staff engineers and Cisco people. We worked together with Cisco on finding the right solutions for implementing the product.

I am intimately aware of what the licensing costs are with Cisco Nexus. It depends on what we decide, how much margin, and what our strategy is when we have an intersection point to where we think won't be spending money on equipment we aren't going to use. 

I have already had conversations, here and at the five portals required to manage the licensing, with the new OS releases and the requirement to use the smart license portal. There are too many portals. We need a manager. 

Cisco Nexus is similar to other licensing costs but it's painful right now. I've sent everything to our account executive to work with for our systems integration and logistical partners. They need to solve this and help train the team. There's a big gap in there.

Cisco Nexus is very costly for the service. It's insurance in case something happens. We have a very good strategy that we're happy with, it's just the renewal process that is problematic on the license. 

When I walked through the customer experience center and explained the situation, they got a good feel for how much pain and suffering it's been. Cisco needs to understand how hard the renewals are each year for us. 

Even having the SmartNet Total Care portal, having a person dedicated to the distributors, etc. it's still a mess. If the incentives get better, which I know Cisco is working on, it would be great, right now, we're buying the license year-to-year.

We have three hundred to four hundred data centers of Nexus. So the coverage associated with Smart Net, 27 by 4, is basically what we spend each year. 

We did look at another vendor. Cisco is found around the world with good support and credibility in the industry. It was an easy choice even though the functionality from the competitor was more.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product an eight for the way I work with my team. They select the product, I serve them. I rate it from a perspective of what the quality of life my team has from using this product. How simple, risk-free, and smooth can we do this without putting the data centers in jeopardy.

Make sure you do your comparisons and make the right decision with the right product before you decide. I would recommend taking a good hard look at Cisco and the Nexus product line and what it could do for you.

It helped us have fewer physical interfaces by being able to share it with multiple virtual contacts. By doing that, we can have fewer devices and fewer physical interfaces, yet retain a more extensive logical setup. So it helps us to have a smaller footprint.

The most valuable feature of the 7700 series is probably that it lets you have multi-context, and also VPC setup, where you have two logical devices that are still separate in terms of management planes but have shared virtual port channels.

They should make sure that the back address auto is baselined. I think it might even be baselined, so it might be that one of our team members had messed that up, but it just wasn't a very straightforward command. You should have multi-context, multi-port channel enabled on the underlay of the Firepower. The way the Firepower firewalls work is they have a management plane, and then you make the virtual ASAs on the Firepower, where you're assigning multiple interfaces or core channels on there. have fewer devices and fewer physical interfaces, yet retain a more extensive logical setup.

It has been very stable so far.

It has been very scalable, from what we've seen.

The few times we have had to talk to technical support it's been pretty decent.

The previous solution we used was the Catalyst 6506 series. We switched to 7706 at that time because it was pretty much comparable to that. It was either a 6506 or moving to a 6807, which was the Catalyst's next series for the next device. The difference between the Catalyst and the Nexus was that Catalyst was doing VSS, where you kind of had two physical switches acting as one logical switch. We had had some issues, especially with upgrades of VSS, so we were trying to avoid using VSS. The 7706 is just more stable than what the Nexus 9000 was at the time we were purchasing this. The Nexus 9000 wasn't fleshed out enough yet to use as the core, so it just made sense to go with the 7706 instead.

The initial setup was pretty complex, mostly because of our environment, having to do multi-context. That's where you have a lot of different logical routes that are in one physical device, and it can get kind of complex trying to think about how to set all that up. You really have to whiteboard it out a lot.

We talked with a lot of vendors, such as Juniper, FortiGate, and some of the other players. Cisco was our chosen solution, because of the level of support and familiarity we had. A lot of us trained in Cisco.

When we were purchasing this, it was the best solution. Now, you might want to look at the Nexus 9000 solution, or maybe the Catalyst 9000 series. You might consider your environment and see what you need. Do you need personal contacts and device management? Or do you need devices acting as one switch for easy management? It just depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for more of the software-defined stuff, and this is going to be in your data center, or maybe you want ACIs, then you're obviously going to be looking at Nexus 9000 there. It just depends on your situation.

I would rate this solution as a nine or ten of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco Nexus solution is to provide data center access for our customers. This includes providing servers, storage, and interconnecting those to the rest of the network.

This product has improved the way our organization functions by providing fast access to storage and data center resources. We are getting better performance out of our network by using this platform.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the capacity of the switches. One of the main advantages of going with the Nexus 9000 is that it can do advanced routing and segmentation with VLANs. 

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see varying integration between VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) instances so we can integrate BGB into different VRFs in a more organized way. We have some issues with tunnels and VRFs. 

The stability of this solution is pretty cool. NX-OS is a solid match. It does run the features and all the protocols very well for us.

The scalability of this solution is very good. We had different options for physical form factors. It does work for what we need on our enterprise network.

We have a 1GB connection to a data center. Then we upgraded a server. We can quickly get more scalability from the switch by migrating to 10GB or even 25GB connections.

Cisco technical support is a good backup team when you have issues with anything. If you open a case they are very good at following up and making sure that the issue's resolved according to the needs of our network.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because upgrading the network is a must for every company. We had to just take into consideration the legacy switches that we were using were not giving the performance needed for the network. The old hardware did not support the demands of our clients connecting to the network.

The initial setup, if you know what you are doing, is very straightforward. You have to know what a switch is and what routing protocols are, like any other device.

If you are familiar with the IOS it is a little bit easier to translate to NX-OS and use the switch.

We're the reseller for Cisco Nexus.

We have seen new ROI from the previous platform to the new one. We're starting to see that.

Our licensing costs for this solution are approximately $100K a year for the switching part.

The products on our shortlist were mostly Cisco Nexus and Meraki.

On a scale from 1 - 10, I would give Cisco Nexus a 9. It's a solid platform. We've been having very good stability from the use of that network device.

Take into consideration the features and the protocols that are in use. Make sure that whatever is being used as a current platform can be migrated to the Nexus and that the features are available before you purchase the hardware. Understand exactly how the infrastructure will work from the operating system of the switch in case you're using any advanced features from another platform. Make sure that the transition is as expected and don't go down a bad path.

We have a lot of customers that we implement Nexus platforms for.

This product is made for lossless data, so it's a very high-performance switch. If there's one place you don't want to lose data, it's in the data center. The 9Ks support speeds of 40-gigabit and 100-gigabit, today. They've got pretty good throughput in the box, they've got virtual output queues, things of that nature, which help contribute to the lossless data.

I like a lot about this solution. They are very high-performance switches and they are made for lossless data, so they're a good play in the customer environment. 

The 9K was developed to support ACI, the software-defined data center technology. For this reason, there is no feature parity between the 9K and the 5K or 7K, which means that it is harder to position the 9K to future proof them. If a customer wants to leverage their investment for ACI in the future then it is difficult. I know that Cisco has added some Fibre Channel over Ethernet capabilities to the 9K line, but there are some other features that it does not have capabilities for. For example, virtual device context is not supported. It would be really nice to see some capabilities like that added to the 9K line so that we can position them to future-proof our customers.

I understand why it is that they don't have some of the features from the older Nexus models, but we get into some scenarios where the customers need those features, and they have to go with a 7K or a 5K. Ideally, I would prefer to position a 9K if I could, to future-proof them and lead them along that path to ACI, eventually.

With respect to the stability, I can't think of any major issues I've ever come across with it.

I think that these units are made to scale, but it depends on how they're deployed. If they're deployed within an ACI environment and that's the customer's expectation, they work fine.

If they're deployed, say, a 9500 model in a non-ACI role, a traditional data center switching role, and the customer decides that they want a virtual device context then we could not support it in that scenario. In this particular case, it wouldn't really scale. That is why it's tough sometimes, in a non-ACI environment, to implement the 9K.

In general, Cisco has always got good technical support.

They're responsive, their people are always available, and they respond relatively quickly. Compared to competitors such as HP, Aruba, Dell EMC Networking, etc, the support from Cisco is always a head and shoulders above those other competitors.

There is some complexity to the initial setup of this solution.

There are a lot of facets to configure a network. It's one thing to configure VLANs and things like that, but when you're configuring quality of service, for example, on a Nexus device, it's all class maps, service policies, mapping queues, and things like that. There is no auto QOS functionality like you might have on a Catalyst switch line, so they're a little bit more complex.

It is not really a big deal because once people have worked with them a little bit, they master it and move on.

They don't see additional revenue from it, but they do see cost savings. With the 9K in NX-OS mode, there's still a lot of touch points with them, although the support for bash and pipe can really simplify that. In an ACI mode, certainly, there are savings because of the orchestration and automation that's occurring as part of the software-defined network.

Cisco's licensing structures can be complex across different technologies, for example, unified communications. The ACI licensing is not so bad.

As they are moving to the DNA Essentials, as opposed to the old Cisco One Advantage-type solution, it is adding a little more complexity to the licensing scenarios. But in general, I think that Cisco is moving toward synching everything up and trying to get everything licensed in a similar way, whether its a data center switch or a campus network switch.

I'm fine with where Cisco is moving to.

There are a lot of competitors out there. For example, the VMware NSX, which is a pure overlay, it's more network virtualization. The ACI solution is more full-featured, and you get visibility under the underlying overlay. It's very performing, and where we've deployed it for customers they are extremely happy with it. There's a learning curve in deploying it because you do things a little differently, but overall it's a solid solution.

When we lead with a software-defined data center, we lead with Cisco.

I'm a pre-sales engineer, and I help customers blueprint out and design their future data center. We really like this solution. It's a great switch. If there is a data center switch we try to lead with, it's the 9K. I like the Cisco ACI solution in general, that the Nexus 9K is a foundation of. I would certainly recommend it.

If a competitor like VM or NSX tries to position their solution and they try to say, "You don't really have to replace the network or re-design the network", that's not really true because the overlay is only going to be as performant as the underlay. If they deploy that technology on an old-age network that's not deployed in a spine and left topology, then the customer is going to have to do that anyway. The Cisco solution takes all of that into consideration as part of the deployment, so it is an optimized software-defined network when it's deployed for the customer.

Overall, they are a pretty good switch, although it doesn't have some of the features that some of the previous lines have had.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.