Cisco Nexus Reviews

I use the solution in the customer's companies. I have used many different version of the solution. 

I find all the data center features to be most valuable, such as VXLAN and OTV. The ACI and FEX connectivity are good features too. Cisco is refining the features all the time and you can see this in all the different vendors.

They could improve on having different technologies between product models. The management dashboard could be better if it could handle the Catalyst and the Nexus at the same time. If Cisco could find management connectivity between the DMA center and the ACI connectivity this would be helpful.

I have been using the product for more than ten years.

The solution is stable.

I have found the scalability good with this product.

The support we received was excellent.

I have worked previously with Catalyst version 6500, 4500, and 3750 series, most of them.

The setup of the solution was easy.

The price of the product is reasonable.

In all the benchmarks and testing that I did, I found the best solution to be Cisco. I recommend the product. They have a good product with all the features that are required. 

I rate Cisco Nexus a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is for Data Center switches.

I like the supportability because it's Cisco. I like the fact that they are a well-supported product. 

I am comfortable with the operating system and I like the regularity of them. 

They are quite straightforward and easy to develop.

I am looking for a GUI that goes alongside them and more SD-WAN built to their core switches.

I'm looking at changing our firewall estate, and at the same time, looking at integrating our firewalls with whatever our core switch solution is going to be. I can't necessarily do that with the costings of a Cisco organization, as they're too expensive.

I have been working with Cisco Nexus for two and a half years.

I am happy with the stability.

It's feature-rich, and they are expandable.

We have approximately a thousand users.

Cisco's technical support and their global footprint are one of the reasons I would stay with Cisco, and I can get their hardware from anywhere in the world.

I wasn't there at the time, but I know who put it in and it was straightforward.

It took a couple of weeks to deploy.

We have two engineers to maintain this solution.

I thought that it would be less expensive. I always thought that Cisco charges more because of who they are, above the product itself. 

Whilst it's the best of the breed, and it's the top right-hand corner at Gartner, I wonder how long that would be attractive.

To others who are interested in this solution, I would say that if you have the money to spend and you want you to want to branch out to the rest of the world, then you should use this solution.

I would rate Cisco Nexus a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the Nexus Series, that's the 7000 Series, as a core switch. We have other 10-gauge switches to work as a server switch.

The storage connection is very good. We use the bonding license. It is is extremely stable. We don't have any issues with it whatsoever.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The licensing is very complicated. They should work to simplify it.

Every feature you want to use you have to pay for separately as an extra cost. The features should be bundled together. It sometimes causes us to have clashes with dealers.

We don't find that there's any difference between the Nexus and Catalyst solutions. It seems that just the marketing is somewhat different, even though they seem to be the same technology.

I've been using this solution since about 2016.

The solution is quite stable. It's one of the solution's selling points for us. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The solution is very scalable. All you have to do when you scale is to follow the right best practices and you can scale without any issue.

We use it for a bank in Sudan, so there can sometimes be sizeable transactions.

Up until last month, our country was under embargo, and therefore it was often difficult to get the proper assistance if we needed it. We've often had to deal with setbacks in terms of technical support care.

We're currently also using VMware which is part of our infrastructure. We use vSphere and Horizon.

Both VMware and Cisco compete within the virtualization space. VMware claims that Nexus can work as a virtual appliance in its infrastructure. From my perspective, we've had little experience with VMware networking.

On the VMware side, I use NSX in my infrastructure. I use it as a load balancer. We are planning to use it as a firewall segmentation.

We found that the initial setup isn't very complex at all. It's rather straightforward.

We only need one person to manage the solution. We technically have two workers, so that we can always have one for redundancy.

The licensing is all over the place and hard to figure out. They don't seem to bundle features. Everything is always an extra cost.

We're just Cisco customers. We work with the 7000 series.

I'd advise users to always know their organization's business needs. If you figure out your business needs, it will help you invest economically. If you don't know your business needs, whether it's Cisco or VMware, they'll try to sell you all types of products - sometimes items you won't use or need.

Overall, we're quite happy with Cisco. I'd rate the solution ten out of 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.

We use this solution in our data center core. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ability to grow into ACI.

I would like to see some development into the SAE world where you can virtualize. That would be the only thing I would like to see because I need to start virtualizing my infrastructure gear at some of the other data centers that I have.

Cisco Nexus has been very stable. No issues. It's been rock solid. We haven't had any issues with it in the last twelve months. It's been good.

The scalability of this solution meets the needs that we have. The density of it is a lot higher than the 7Ks. It's good for us from that perspective. 

I could take two 7Ks that are 16-chassis, get it down into eight and have twice as much throughput. 

The solution's technical support has been fine. We haven't had to use it much.

At this point, the newest solution was purchased out of necessity for end-of-life gear. It was a refresh. Our previous solution was 7K, 5K, 2K. 

The 2Ks and 5Ks were going end-of-life. We're starting to prepare for the 7Ks going end-of-life. We went with the Cisco Nexus 9K solutions because of this.

The initial setup of the Cisco Nexus series is very straightforward. We didn't have any issues. 

We already had a 5K, 7K, and 2K environment. Going to the 9Ks was straightforward. We were experienced in the Nexus area. It wasn't anything new.

Deployment was done by a supplier partner of ours, British Telecom. Our experience with them was good.

It's around $160K a year for our license.

We have a management contract with Cisco. They are our managed service provider. We didn't have much of a choice.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this product a ten because of the stability. Stability is my biggest key right now. Cisco Nexus has been stable since it was implemented last year.

It's a good product. I haven't had any issues whatsoever. 

This solution manages our data center and is our core infrastructure switch. All of our firewalls and application servers terminate into the 5K.

The most valuable feature is its flexibility. You can put different blades in it to give scalability, but it is older technology.

This solution is only scalable to a degree.

This is a very expensive product.

Areas in which the solution have room for improvement are the interface, management, and reporting. You still have to go deep into the CLI to find issues.

This is a very stable solution. I have a separate model, a 7K, that has been up and running for seven and a half years.

The scalability of this solution is limited. You can only add so much hardware capacity to them, and because it's hardware based, you can't get the new features sets without putting new switches in.

Technical support is very robust. The Nexus line is the backbone of Cisco's data center. Anytime I have had to call technical support for anything, they have been able to assist us.

As a solution reaches end-of-life you replace it. We're using the Nexus 5K right now, and we're probably going to start looking at the 9Ks as these reach end-of-life.

The hardware that existed pre-5K was replaced before I joined the company.

The initial setup took place before I joined the company.

We used CBTS to assist us with our implementation.

This is a solid, reliable solution, but it is very expensive and it can only scale to a degree.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

The most valuable features are extensions and recorded scalability.

Areas for improvement would be the delivery timeline for the actual model, the length of which means we have to sacrifice a range of models because we can't wait six months for delivery.

I've been working with this solution for a few months.

In terms of stability, it's so far so good - we haven't faced any big issues at this point.

We want to extend out to other regions, which is very easy to achieve if compared to the typical traditional legacy layer 2 switch, layer 3 routing approach.

The initial setup wasn't simple or user-friendly. We're still in the process of fully deploying - currently, we've been working on it for around three months.

We used the Cisco team to implement, with whom we've had a good experience. We've also had support from HPE, who are very technically strong and able to answer any questions we have on the spot.

I don't like the Smart Licensing models that Cisco uses.

Cisco is one of the most stable solutions, regardless of which model. I would give this solution a rating of eight out of ten.