Cisco Nexus Reviews

I am an engineer and work primarily with our data center network and data center security. The Nexus switch is a data center switch and I have a lot of recent experience with it. My company is a solution provider and this is one of the products that we sell to our clients.

The 9000 series works really well in the spine-and-leaf architecture and gives you capabilities up to 400 gig.

The most valuable feature is performance. Not many customers are using the 400 gig speed yet, but you do have flexibility as if you're going to run the ports at 10 gig, 40 gig, or 100 gig. That port flexibility is really important.

There is an ongoing problem with the limitation of the TCAM table, which is that it doesn't have enough memory to allow you to be really granular with your policy. Without enough memory, it requires manual manipulation if you exceed or get near to the TCAM limits. They have improved it, but in the early days, it took down some companies.

I have been using Cisco products for many years and have experience with the Nexus line since it was first released.

These switches are very stable.

The spine-and-leaf architecture is very scalable. If you need more ports to plug servers in, you add more leaves. If you need more throughput then you add more spines.

All of the switches at the top are the spine, and those plug into those are the leaves, and then the servers plug into the leaves. It's highly scalable, because if you have more servers then just purchase two more switches. If you need more throughput and better performance, then you just purchase two switches for the spine. You can continue to scale out the model very simply.

The Nexus 9000 platform is by far the best-selling and most popular, and there are a couple of reasons for that. It's less expensive than a 7K or 5K solution and in fact, we hardly sell the 5Ks anymore. The 9000 really works well in the spine-and-leaf, which is the current architecture.

The initial setup is really straightforward and if you use ACI, running on top of the Nexus 9K, you don't really have to do anything but plug the switches in. The software manages all of the policy.

Without ACI, setup requires the use of the command line, which is the same as it's always been.

The maintenance can be handled by one person or a small team.

The Nexus 9000 is very competitively priced. 

The Nexus Dashboard is a relatively new product that is in the portfolio for the data center. It hosts the multi-site orchestrator and has functionality for self-healing and self-optimizing of the data center network. It's Nexus' best work.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is that if you're looking to cut costs in the data center, there's not that big of a difference between a Cisco switch and other switches. But, when it comes to things like storage, between the most expensive and the least expensive, there's a lot of different pricing in there. So, I wouldn't cut costs on your switches. I would suggest looking at other areas where you can cut costs.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

The product is basically used for our entire phone system.

After implementing the product, it made things a lot easier. We have good quality as far as calls and it's pretty easy to roll out new updates. It is very accommodating to provide that for our contact center.

Quality is really the most valuable feature. Being able to interconnect components between different clusters around the globe gives us the flexibility we need. That pretty much makes what we do possible.

I don't really know any improvements that we would need right now as a company. I would say it would be nice to support more phone models in general. For us that doesn't matter as we really stick with one type of phone. There hasn't been a phone refresh — I think — in maybe five years, but I think that's kind of how Cisco rolls. They do have a 10 year run on phones.

Better monitoring would be a big thing to have. The RTMT (Real-time Monitoring Tool) is good, but I also know they're moving to a web-based solution so certain updates to current products won't be on the way. Being able to drill down and have better adaptivity going forward would be nice. But I think that concentrating on the web-based solution is their plan and the way they're going. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out.

I think the solution is pretty stable. We are going to upgrade soon, but we've been on version 11 of Unified Communications Manager for two years. We usually try to upgrade every year, but we try to wait for a few SUs (Software Updates) and upgrade later on. We try not to be on the latest and greatest, in case of any bugs.

The scalability of the solution is very good. The only thing I don't like is that there's an 80-millisecond requirement between cluster servers. I have to have multiple clusters around the world: I can't just have one giant cluster. There are ways around that requirement, but I wish they could figure it out.

Cisco technical support is good now and has gotten better over the years. The Webex support can be a lot better as far as response. Sometimes I don't get responses for two or three days. But as far as technical support for other products, it's good.

Pretty much the product I always go to is Cisco, so that's my preference. I'm not new to the solution. It's consistent and does what we need it to.

The initial setup was straightforward. I'm the senior engineer so I've had to go through my bumps and bruises, but it's pretty much straightforward if you know what you're doing.

We didn't go with a vendor team for implementation, we did it ourselves. We do use a reseller, Continental Resource. They provide hardware for us and software licensing and all that.

We have definitely seen a return on investment as far as our contact center and when we build new offices, we can build them quickly.

I've never gone with any other type of phone systems. It pretty much has been Cisco all along.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten. I think that giving it a ten would be to place it ahead of every other solution and I can't be sure that's the case. I, personally, think it's above everyone else but I haven't tried all of the solutions in order to know first-hand.

I've always been told: you never get fired if you own Cisco.

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 really lag on the AC infrastructure where the configuration and the changes make a difference in terms of troubleshooting.

The product improves us when we see an expert and L1/L2 engineers for support. We have a dependency there. A simple configuration makes a big difference. It can create more chaos inside the network. We need to make sure when we make changes in one platform and it impacts other platforms, that the technical problems don't reach the end users.

There should be better certifications. More training should be provided before we get into this product.

We are just migrating to Cisco Nexus as a newer product. We are looking for similar features in Arista. We are closing the gap from Cisco ASA to an Arista ASA environment. This gives us a very stable network when compared to Cisco.

I get very good support from Cisco. The response was very fast when compared to other vendors. 

I advise anyone to invest in a new solution because we do a periodic refresh every three years. For any product we buy, we ensure it is in the warranty and it is the leader in the market. 

We go through the Gartner studies to understand the leaders in the market. Then, we get the solutions from the partners and go over them. We do a case study with the other competitive companies on the product they use and their experience with it.

The setup was very easy, but managing it in operations was very complex. The VLANs are different. We have a network outside and inside of the ASA infrastructure.

It is not possible to provide privileged access to L1 or L2 engineers. If you provide L3 access, there is a chance that they mess up the network by making smaller changes that you don't want. 

We implemented Cisco Nexus through a consultant.

Another option was Aruba Networks.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a 6 or 5. The reason is that we are into Cisco for a long time. They have been very good supporters since we began the network environment.

For any technology on the education part, for the training and decisions, there are more resources available than when compared to other partner products. Planning technology through Cisco for our training sessions and getting it implemented with other products is what we do now.

Currently, we are assessing the leaders in the market for the data-container environment and SD-WAN solutions. VeloCloud was suggested by colleagues of neighbor companies.

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.