Cisco Nexus Reviews

I use Cisco Nexus for the private cloud.

It's easy to use.

The implementation process could be easier, which is something that should be improved.

I have been using Cisco Nexus for three years.

We are using version six suite, 9372.

We don't have any issues with the stability of this solution.

Cisco Nexus is scalable.

We have 2,000 to 3,000 people in our organization who are using this solution.

I have contacted technical support.

It could be easier to install.

It takes approximately two weeks to deploy.

I have a team of 10 IT people in the IT department to maintain this solution.

I deployed the solution myself, I didn't use an integrator or consultant.

We have a virtual license.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

It's very good. I would rate cisco Nexus an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco Nexus solution is network connectivity.

It's based on the Cisco line of products, so a lot of people are trained with them.

The most valuable feature of this solution is user configurability.

In the next release of this solution, Cisco should keep trending on ease-of-use, with more human or regular language and commands.

Maybe they could add some machine learning and AI integration. Ease-of-use and making things more human-readable is most important.

Cisco Nexus is very stable.

It is very scalable.

The Cisco Nexus technical support is very good.

We needed to invest in a new solution because of speed. We used older versions of Cisco Cloud. The reason why we switched was just adapting with the times.

The initial setup is straightforward with the right training. Search out there, find a lot of knowledge before you begin.

I did the setup myself.

The license on a yearly basis is $200,000.

Cisco was on the shortlist with Extreme and Juniper. We chose Cisco because there was integration with other Cisco equipment in the data center.

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate Cisco Nexus an eight to nine.

We use Cisco Nexus for data center requirements and interconnectivity. 

VPC is the most valuable feature for us. 

Cisco Nexus is very safe and stable. I've been here 8 months. We have some devices that have been out for 11 years.

It's scalable.

Cisco customer support is very easy and very quick. If I need to I can get somebody on the phone straight away.

I've used Ruckus, HP, Dell, and smaller products for enterprise solutions.

The hardest part with Cisco Nexus is learning new features. What would be nice is if Nexus were easier to use. Best practices in deployment would be helpful.

Cisco Nexus is just a platform. You just set it up, give it an IP, and then start configuring it. But there are a million features to configure.

I'm always thinking of the environment a little bit as I learn new things. After the initial sale, deployment I can do in an hour. Once you start trying to fork out the little kinks, it is longer.

Pay attention to what shows up in your excess logs. We try to stay current with updates. Try to keep up with that.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Nexus a 10 for stability. There's always room for improvement.

The Cisco Nexus switches are the best and most reliable solution for us in my previous company, which was a telecom service provider. We used cisco modular switches for our heavy services as part of our GSM network as it requires heavy processing and highest performance.

Its easy management is most valuable. It is easy to use, easy to manage, stable, and very reliable.

The cost of the support can be improved. We had critical operations, and we needed 24/7 support for 365 days, which was quite expensive. We had to go for a very costly support contract, which was really a concern. The availability of spare parts, especially in a remote location such as Egypt, can also be improved.

I have been using this solution for quite sometime, several years.

It is stable and reliable.

It is very scalable. We had around 7,000 users in our company & more than 26 million GSM customers.

They have been responsive, but you need the right support contract. We had critical operations, and normally, we asked for the highest level of support and next-day replacement or avail spare parts on-site. It was easy and not that difficult but very costly. 

It was straightforward and easy.

General it is a mutual cooperation and ix between the in-house team and the vendor, and both are highly qualified.

Licensing is annual or every three years. We were one of the big customers, and we used to get good prices, but the cost of the support need to be improved.

I would rate Cisco Nexus an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for our data center environment.

The flexibility, how accurately the VPCs operate as well as the redundancy built into it with the VPCs are the most valuable features. 

I would like to see improved ISSU.

It's a stable solution, but there are a few bugs here and there in it and it would be nice if they weren't there. The Mac looping is an issue as well. 

The ISSUs sometimes go down.

It's very scalable. You can go up or down in size as much as you want. 

Their technical support is outstanding. We had some issues at the core layer in our Nexus data center, and the 7Ks were hitting a bug, and we couldn't figure that out until we got really deep into debugs. Their tech support was able to resolve that. 

We had our Cisco account rep and they helped us figure out what the right solution was for us.

The initial setup was rather complex because it was my first time deploying Nexus, and you have to turn on all the features to make them all work and that's something that you don't have in any other Cisco switch. It threw me for a loop. But once you figure out the resources and setting up the VDCs and everything, you're good.

I deployed this solution myself. 

We definitely got ROI from Nexus and a pretty short term because the pure redundancy and the uptime, is a real value add for us.

We were using another solution and we went with Cisco because it has more features. Also because Cisco is reliably good; nobody ever got fired for choosing Cisco.

We were looking at Arista and Juniper, but we ended up going with Cisco, mainly because of the features.

I would rate this product a pretty solid eight out of ten because it's been pretty reliable and good and it's done what it's supposed to do. There's been a little bit of bugginess in the code, but that happens.

I would consider the cost and functionality that you need and consider this in between ACI and a Nexus deployment. Right now, ACI isn't super mature, and if you don't have people that are able to actually dig in and really learn ACI, Nexus still might be the best solution.

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 in our data center.

This solution has allowed us to scale bigger than ever.

The most valuable feature is that it is high-density, ten-gig.

The code quality for this solution has gotten worse and needs improvement.

The hardware is stable, but the code quality has gotten worse.

The scalability of this solution is great.

Cisco's technical support is great.

I have always used Cisco products.

The initial setup of this solution is complex, but that is expected. You have to put a lot of thought into it.

My advice to anybody implementing this solution is to plan ahead six months.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.