Cisco Nexus Reviews

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.

Our main use of Cisco Nexus is as our data center core switch.

Nexus provides inner redundancy. It allows us to perform updates on individual switches, while still maintaining reliability and uptime on the server.

Overall, I wish it was a more intuitive OS.

It's a stable product. It definitely holds up the workload that we put it through. Overall, I would say it's a great product.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

It's a good return on my investment because of its reliability that it provides with our main PCs, our dual homes on our devices.

Buy what you know that's going to be the best value in the long run, because if you don't know it, then it's going to be hard.

It's the only one I know that allows us to dual home our servers in our HyperFlex environment, but still maintaining our virtual IP address and such.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

Our primary use for Cisco Nexus is for storage.

It helps for data servers.

It provides a very flexible connection to a server. When you go into history and the VPC, it provides a very flexible connection from it. Once a server goes down I can handle it easily. So the network actually keeps quality even if onsite it is down.

There is some room for improvement when it comes to the frequency on the network.

I don't work in security so I do not deal with this subject. I just make the network available. I think it's probably good. From the networking point of view, we just provide them the network that is going to be Cisco 9000, but they are using the servers. I have not gotten any complaints. We just deployed less than two months ago.

The technical support is very good. I really like the way Cisco handles support. I am building this 9000 network. I had a lot of issues because of the vast complications you find setting up a network. I knew I could get help from Cisco.

We switched to 400G. We provide 100G on our network. I needed something which can carry 100, so next time this has that option. That is the reason we went with this partner.

As a customer of Cisco, we always have had meetings with them on their new products. We tell them what kind of solution we are looking for and Cisco says for this solution you need this kind of thing.

I would recommend this product. It does not give me any headaches. That is the best thing. There are lots of products, but when you use this, it does not give you any headaches.

It is good because when we went to purchase this, we did not have all the information and knowing that there are a lot of options with all those differences, we had some issues, but it is obvious that this solution is going to do everything that we need. That is fine.

Our primary use case is for our core network.

The most valuable features are the great performance, high availability and easy administration.

The price is a con.

Our network is stable.

It's scalable.

If you previously used a different solution, which one did you use and why did you switch?

We needed to upgrade our network and we needed to decide to change our core network.

The initial setup was straightforward, it was simple.

We used our reseller for the implementation. We liked them.

ROI comes after three years.

We used Cisco before. When we made the decision to choose a new solution, we evaluated other vendors and chose Nexus.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten because it's the best.

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.

Our primary use case for the Cisco Nexus is for a VXLAN environment with some video multicast.

I don't think we've been using Cisco Nexus long enough to know accurately how it is improving our organization. Our first deployment was about a month ago.

The most valuable features of Cisco Nexus are the performance, flexibility, configuration, and cost. It's not a traditional pricing model from Cisco. They've offered our company a considerable reduction in price. That makes Cisco Nexus now very competitive with other vendors.

One improvement needed is support for Multi-CAD scale that we were concerned about. We're not hitting any limits at this point. There were concerns about the amount of server capacity that was going to be available. We like to see things that are already there as opposed to being told where they will be. 

The stability of Cisco Nexus thus far has been excellent. We had some initial issues with some non-Cisco optics, third parties claiming compatibility when they weren't compatible.

We've not had a scale-out yet. Cisco Nexus looks very valuable. We're starting to deploy them in other environments as well.

Cisco technical support for the 9000 is good. During our issues, we had excellent technical support. The support issues required around 40 hours. We had Cisco engineers available for the entire time. It was impressive.

In the production of our network, we've grown in scale, and that's really what it came down to. Previously we wouldn't have thought that a Nexus product was comparable to some of the other vendors, like Arista and Juniper. But the features of the 9000 brought it into line with the capabilities of other vendors that we used.

The setup is straightforward. Nexus uses options that our engineers are familiar with. The advantages were that we could leverage the knowledge that we already had.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate it a 9. Cisco is very competitive with the other companies that are out there. I would recommend them. We've had very good luck.

Cisco is a leader. They help us with the deployment at a lower cost.

We use Cisco Nexus primarily to check the health of our links. We use it to make sure if our links are good or not. It really helps with troubleshooting.

Cisco Nexus has improved the way our organization functions through the troubleshooting. We had issues where we've seen our links saturated. We were able to determine what was being processed on the link. 

It has reduced the complexity of our network monitoring because I'm able to drill down quickly and figure out what's going on. 

It has helped us make sure that we have the best uptime that we can have. 

Although it could be better, you can get the granularity depending on the amount of time that you drill into it.

I would like to see more granularity. 

The stability of the solution is very good.

It scales very well.

We did not have a previous solution.

Cisco Nexus is straightforward to set up. We just pointed our logs to it. It's pretty easy. 

We used a consultant. I didn't install it, I don't know exactly how it was done.

We have seen ROI based on the fact that we have more uptime.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven because it's helped out a lot in terms of troubleshooting.

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.