Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms Reviews

Currently, we are using the Cisco 5585 and the Firepowers, and the Firepower IPS, which comes as part of the firewall module, and the switching and the routing. For switching, we have the Catalyst and the core switch, the big one, which is 8800, and also 68 series.

I have experience working with Cisco products and Cisco solutions many times. I used to work on Cisco at the beginning, but nowadays I am on another platform. At this time, I am in a particular administrator position. From time to time, I am driving some standards of a Cisco product. We have UCS, ASA 5585, and Firepower.

What I appreciate about Catalyst is that it is so powerful. The advantage of Catalyst is that it is powerful and intelligent. Compared to other vendors, such as Huawei and others, Cisco switches are more powerful and very intelligent. I prefer Cisco because they can carry a heavy load and are sometimes scalable. You can purchase them for use on a small-scale network, and when the network grows, you do not need to purchase again. You can simply add some licenses.

We do use the application hosting capabilities of Catalyst because these represent best practices that I advocate for rather than always configuring on the command line. Configuring on the interfaces is preferable.

The application hosting capabilities have helped our operations because it is efficient and very forward-thinking. I recall that there is a shortage of Cisco engineers, but you can still teach someone from high school to configure Catalyst on the GUI interface, and it is easy to understand. It is very straightforward for me in terms of business strategy on how I proceed with it. It is beneficial for the business and user-friendly because on the GUI interfaces, you are working with something you can see, and you do not need to memorize all the configuration commands every time. You simply click on it.

I assess the comprehensive security measures of Catalyst in safeguarding my network operations as very intelligent. When you have network segmentation, you can apply securitization on the VLANs, and there is nothing difficult about that case. You can also apply role-based access. It is very intelligent.

The only improvement I can suggest for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is that in the AI era, it will be important to embed machine learning capabilities. It will be important to embed some agencies within that technology and ensure that the technology is able to manage the traffic coming from the agent and also from the robots. Nowadays, companies are starting to adopt new technology with robot agents. I believe that there will be a lot of traffic coming from those agencies. We need to understand the capabilities on how we can onboard them on our technology, on our network on Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms.

The last time I worked with Cisco directly was about five years ago. However, I am managing the team which is working with that product every day, so it is the same as if I am operating it every day.

When analyzing the performance of Catalyst in my network infrastructure, it is outstanding. After purchasing that technology, you no longer experience network cuts or disruptive network downtime. Our traffic flows very well. If you are changing the traffic from 10 megabytes to 100 megabytes, it is capable of carrying that traffic. Nothing is difficult, unless perhaps after five to ten years.

In terms of stability and scalability, it is highly scalable and highly reliable.

Implementing Catalyst as a gateway has not been difficult at all, especially because Cisco always provides an engineer to support us. Even if the chassis is broken, it is not difficult. Cisco engineers, the best of the best, those who have the CCIE certification, are there online to help you configure, assemble that, take out the module, the chassis, and replace it. It is not difficult at all.

I previously used a different product, specifically Huawei, and that is why we have managed to replace all of them in my company. We also used Akamai and IBM. Those switches, all of them, for some reason, do not come close to Cisco.

The setup of Catalyst is straightforward, and I find the deployment easy. Cisco has a good portal where you can learn each and every capability of the technology and learn how to set it up from scratch until production. Cisco advocates best practices and provides best practices documentation. You learn the technology itself as a Cisco product, and you also learn how the industry has been doing things. That education is much more important.

We bought Catalyst directly through Cisco and do not buy through other distributors because 90% of the time when we have issues, we go directly to Cisco.

I do not know much about the pricing, setup costs, or licensing. For the pricing, I always hear my manager complaining about the cost, but I do not know much. I am focused on the capability and performance. I am focusing on doing the job, onboarding the traffic, and making sure that things work well. When it comes to the package, finance, and other aspects, I have not been involved. However, Cisco products are quality. Even though they are expensive, they are quality. You are assured about the warranties and Cisco support for quite some time, perhaps five to ten years. What about the other products, which we can call cheap products? You are still going to have more issues. Why do we need to go for that? I prefer to go for Cisco, even though they may complain about the pricing.

The key differences, both pros and cons of Cisco in comparison to other technologies are significant. Scalability is one advantage. We are able to be scalable. In our companies, we onboard a small portion of the department and then enlarge that onboarding to the bigger version. I am managing 16 OpCos now, and when I am starting to onboard all the 16 OpCos, Cisco technology is able to carry over the load. The scalability is good, and the performance is very good. Additionally, it is still user-friendly at the moment. When coming to SFTP, the exchange of SFTP does not have challenges. There are very few challenges which I have encountered with Cisco technology. Compared to the others, you always get the bottleneck. For some reason, you need to pay for everything. Even the support is very hard because very few people are using it and very few people are certified on the technology. It is very hard to work on other products. If you are working with Cisco, Cisco itself is up to par and is giving the full support and everything.

I still work with the product, specifically with this solution, but I have low hands-on experience myself. However, I am managing the team which is hands-on. 90% of the time, even now, if you call my team, they will be configuring something on the switch.

I have not touched Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms for the SD-WAN. I recall the Catalyst, the 48 and 4 services, as well as the 6 services. I have never gotten to the 8000.

For Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, we are using it normally because it is a layer three switch. We are using it for the MPLS connection and BGP. We are working on doing some network segmentation and are doing a lot of other work on them.

I also mentioned that I use the UCS, the servers, and I also used the ASA.

My advice to other organizations considering Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms would be as follows: if they are going to grow bigger on their network and traffic, and if they want their network to be very stable, they must consider taking Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms. I would advise them to have Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms if they ever want to have stability, good performance, scalability, and reliability. I rate this solution 9.5 out of 10.

Our use case for using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is that we were establishing a new equipment room for the relocation from the old building to the new building.

The features I appreciate about Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms include its ability to integrate with Cisco ISE seamlessly, allowing for very easy integration with Windows AD for authentication, and the user credentials are integrated together with the capability to detect non-authorized devices. I can implement MAB for the printers to work together with the authentication, and our support team can easily import the list of MAC addresses for those printers and some of the IP phones, ensuring that they work very well. It also provides excellent integration with ISE for administrators to manage the devices.

For analytics and telemetry, I have exported the logs from Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms network devices and firewall devices to Splunk, which is now part of Cisco. I use Splunk to analyze the logs, checking device healthiness and receiving alerts to spot any unusual activity. If there are issues, such as switches or ports being disconnected, or if someone connects their own laptop to the bank's network, our ISE detects it and forces disconnection immediately, filing an alert to our email. This allows us to address the issue with the user and escalate it to management. On the analytics side, it significantly aids in performing security operations, with reporting generating monthly and daily reports that keep management informed about security and performance status. The monthly report summarizes data, such as the number of external attacks blocked by firewalls and attempts to access the bank's network through port scanning, enabling us to create statistics and build ban lists for blocking malicious IP addresses.

The price for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is somewhat higher compared to Chinese brands, though the difference is not huge. A more aggressively priced option would be better.

I would appreciate updates with new features and capabilities for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, as it would be good to know about future integrations.

I would particularly appreciate seeing new integrations and features related to AI in future updates, especially how Catalyst or Cisco will provide AI features integrated with their very stable product.

I have only worked with a Chinese bank product in the context of similar products to Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms.

I find Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms quite reliable, meaning it is also very stable with no crashes and zero downtime.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is very scalable, easy to expand, and will not cause trouble.

I appreciate the technical support from Cisco, as it is very helpful.

If I had to rate support from 0 to 10, I would give them eight points.

I have only worked with a Chinese bank product in the context of similar products to Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms.

In terms of installation, I find it very easy to install Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, particularly because many post-sales support companies in Hong Kong know how to work with Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms.

I will support Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms at any time, as I have used Cisco products for more than 20 years, finding them technically advanced compared to other solutions.

I do see a return on investment with Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms; however, if we cannot afford to buy it, realizing the ROI becomes difficult.

Quantifying ROI is very difficult; if I had to estimate, it would be at least 20 percent savings in time and money.

As a customer, the biggest advantage of Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms that I think of is its reliability, which makes me really confident to use it.

My setup is only on-premises; I do not utilize cloud solutions.

The application performance in our remote and branch offices remains unaffected as we have plenty of bandwidth available locally, without hitting any limitations.

I have not purchased Cisco products from AWS Marketplace; instead, I work directly with our Cisco SI to purchase the product.

I would rate this product an overall 8 out of 10.

Major use cases for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms are primarily for SD-WAN Edge devices, application-aware routing, and it combines routing and security since this is a one-box solution integrated with a firewall, IPS, IDS, and URL filtering, along with VPN IPsec and segmentation concepts.

When analyzing performance of Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, I'm looking at network WAN performance metrics for mission-critical applications, measuring metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, RTT value, and also using SLA-based routing for path selection. In terms of application performance metrics, Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms uses Deep Packet Inspection, focusing on application response time, per application latency, jitter, loss, and throughput per application.

In terms of analytics and telemetry, we are using NETCONF or SNMP polling. We monitor interface statistics, loss, latency, jitter, application performance, CPU, and memory utilization. If we have an IPsec tunnel, we're also monitoring telemetry such as tunnel health, alongside routing and control plane status using vManage or ThousandEyes.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is very user-friendly, and comparing with Fortinet and Palo Alto, Fortinet is definitely the cheapest, followed by Cisco, while Palo Alto is too costly.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is very easy to install and use; we've been using Cisco for three to four decades, and it is really good. It's user-friendly for everyone.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is quite affordable and not too expensive.

For troubleshooting, we are using vManage and ThousandEyes or CLI. We could improve in terms of step-by-step root cause analysis by integrating AI in vManage to assist users, especially remote IT users who are not full experts in IT technology, in performing basic troubleshooting tests.

I have seven to eight months of experience handling Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is a scalable product for me, and the same applies to my customers. Performance remains good and I do not have issues with performance. I would rate stability eight to nine out of ten.

We have both cloud and private environments since I work at Orange, known as France Telecom. Both are very scalable and stable. Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is a scalable product for me, and the same applies to my customers.

I find their support to be very good. In my last experience, while deploying a Captive Portal for a customer and integrating it with ICE, Cisco TAC support resolved a bug within a couple of hours, which was very important for my customer. I'd rate Cisco support eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

Cisco is completely in the past, but in the middle of some of the projects I'm handling, such as organic growth type requests, I'm dealing with Cisco SD-WAN as well.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is very easy to install and use; we've been using Cisco for three to four decades, and it is really good. It's user-friendly for everyone.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is very user-friendly, and comparing with Fortinet and Palo Alto, Fortinet is definitely the cheapest, followed by Cisco, while Palo Alto is too costly.

I do not work with application hosting capability in Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms. Implementing Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms as a gateway does not affect application performance across remote or branch offices.

In terms of SD-WAN, I work with FortiGate for security. I'm currently on Fortinet SD-WAN, which is a FortiGate. We also have a third-party IPsec tunnel to form an IPsec tunnel with the third party, including Cisco and Palo Alto, depending upon the third-party devices.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is mainly for VPN, and since I work at Orange, where we have different clients, depending upon the requirement of the different customers, if a customer is willing to migrate existing legacy networks to Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, Fortinet SD-WAN, or Palo Alto SD-WAN, I deal with these SD-WAN technologies including the security part.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is a very good product, and with this, we can do so many things, including integrating with the firewall, URL filtering, VPN, IPsec segmentation, and other capabilities. I would rate this product nine out of ten overall.

My main use case for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is that in our deployment, we use it only as a Meraki SD-WAN hardware platform for new SD-WAN sites, serving as the SD-WAN gateway for offices.

Providing a specific example of how I use it as an SD-WAN gateway for our offices is straightforward: the office consists of LAN and Wi-Fi deployment with switches and access points, all using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms as the gateway to the outside. With that SD-WAN gateway, we connect our data centers with gateways in the hub, and we connect to internet applications using tunnels to our cloud security provider.

We have been using this new platform recently, transitioning from Meraki MX platforms to a mix of MX platforms and Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms using the Meraki software only.

The best features Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms offers include the cloud managed feature that helps the most because we are managing a very large deployment of SD-WAN sites. Regarding software updates, it is very convenient to use the power of cloud managed to roll out software updates whenever there are bugs or vulnerabilities, allowing us to do that quickly and efficiently. Although not directly related to the hardware platform, that is what we love about Meraki. So far, the hardware has been reliable for us, and since we use the platforms for SD-WAN access at any site, including business-critical locations such as factories or warehouses, stability is our number one feature. We are happy with that and hope to scale the bandwidth because the bandwidth requirement for the offices is growing, and we believe Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms will support this use case.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms positively impacts my organization because, although we were using Meraki MX for a long time with no new model from them, we were concerned about supporting the increasing bandwidth requirement for our sites. Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms helps with this, as we understand it is a newer platform with many optimizations under the hood that can be done to make it more powerful and able to support larger bandwidth requirements.

I believe Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms can improve by needing to support more bandwidth; we are reaching the physical capacity at some sites and need to support more than 10 gig, such as by having 25 gig interfaces for LAN and WAN if the software permits that bandwidth. Additionally, the firewall management requires significant improvement, as the current behavior resembles firewalls from 25 years ago; it lacks central management policies and objects that modern firewalls possess. We are aware that enhancements are coming and hope they arrive soon.

I have been using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms for approximately one to two years.

Regarding the cloud managed feature, it appears very similar compared to what I had with Meraki MX; there is no significant difference in managing Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms from the dashboard versus Meraki MX. While the hardware is different, requiring a newer software version, the dashboard offers the same look and feel. For stability and reliability, so far, so good; however, given how we deploy in small and medium sites before moving to more critical sites, we still need to build greater trust by deploying Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms on our biggest sites.

The scalability of Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is something we still need to discover; we believe we will be able to use it at our bigger sites and data centers, but it is still something to learn.

I think we have already mentioned customer support; it is good to use the dashboard and portal to open tickets via a web interface, but sometimes if the issue is software-related and requires a developer to fix or write code, it can take a long time.

I have previously used traditional networking solutions such as MPLS, routers, and firewalls, and we have been using Cisco Viptela before switching to Cisco Meraki as the SD-WAN solution. We picked Meraki primarily for its ease of management, the great cloud manage feature, and its ability to roll out updates quickly while having fewer vulnerabilities compared to other SD-WAN vendors.

My advice for others looking into using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is to first look at the features available on the platform because, in the Meraki form we use, there are not as many routing or firewall features compared to other vendors. Consider if zero touch deployment are key differentiators for your deployment size, as it makes a significant difference when deploying many sites. Also contemplate how you will operate your overall WAN or SD-WAN solution; if you have a small team and many sites, a centralized and simple platform with observability and built-in monitoring tools is essential. Lastly, assess the security aspects and the management of vulnerabilities; for us, when Cisco Meraki has a patch, rolling it out is easy, which has been proven beneficial. I would rate my overall experience with Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms a 7 out of 10.

I have been using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms for more than one year, and I use it for different projects.

My main use case for Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is SD-WAN, routing, security, and cloud connectivity, and it is very useful.

I mostly use Catalyst 8000 Edge family for remote sites or, depending on the type, I place it in the data center or similar locations, and I am trying to set up a nice topology.

Then I test it for several features so I can use it for the proof of concept part.

I can check all the features, security services, modules, interfaces, and all features before I release it.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms are very powerful devices and very interesting.

Most importantly, you can manage it with vManage from the GUI and cloud, so you do not need to test or have it physically, allowing you to manage it from the cloud anywhere, and that is very important for monitoring.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms offers many capabilities including BGP, OSPF, static routing, VRFs, IPsec, routing, NAT, and advanced features including IPS, IDS, URL filtering, and segmentation.

QoS and the cloud SASE integration are also notable.

I find all those features, including segmentation, SASE integration, and advanced security options, very powerful and important.

SASE is now a very interesting secure access solution, and there are many cloud security platforms you can integrate with SD-WAN, allowing all the traffic to go through different clouds securely.

Advanced security features including IPS and URL filtering are very important for security based on your company policy, and segmentation is very handy and powerful because you can separate your networks from VLANs, IoT devices, or users.

I would also add that the new generation firewall in SD-WAN can be used for all vEdge 8000, making it very powerful as well.

With Catalyst vManage, you have everything at one glance, making it very helpful.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is developing each month.

I can see many new firmware releases from Cisco, and each firmware improves on the last one, offering better performance and security.

With AI connecting everything, I expect to see more efficient protocols or features soon.

I have been using it for more than one year.

In my experience, Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms is stable.

Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms has good scalability.

My experience with customer support has been good.

I prefer Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms because it is more handy, friendly, and feature-rich.

I switched from another vendor to Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms from Cisco.

Before choosing Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms, I evaluated other options, but I would rather not mention the names of the vendors since it is not good to do so.

We switched to Cisco because it is better and more usable for us.

This assessment is not directly from my perspective because I am an engineer focused on technical aspects, so I cannot share metrics regarding return on investment.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is difficult to define because each company or customer has different needs.

However, in general, I think it is good, competitive, and reasonable.

I would advise others looking into using Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms to go for it as it is a good option, and you can have a good product along with good support from Cisco.

Everything is good, and I very much enjoy this product.

I would rate this review a nine out of ten.