Nitin Joshilkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at NKGSB BANK
Real User
Top 10
A stable and scalable solution that provides excellent features and integrations
Pros and Cons
  • "The integrations are valuable."
  • "The pricing must be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution for the data center.

What is most valuable?

We are using the vPC and FEX. The integrations are valuable.

What needs improvement?

The pricing must be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

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Cisco Nexus
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Nexus. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There are no bugs or glitches. I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have two to three users. I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. The deployment requires two to three months. It’s a heavy setup. Around three to four people were involved in the setup.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

What other advice do I have?

We are planning to deploy Cisco ACI. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
IT specialist at IGFEJ
Real User
Top 5
It's an easy-to-use data center solution
Pros and Cons
  • "The interface is easy to use. It is not much different from iOS, but you can use it on a larger scale in data centers."
  • "Nexus is a costly solution."

What is our primary use case?

We use Cisco Nexus in our data center to aggregate all the systems in our enterprise. Everyone in the company uses it indirectly, so we have 72,000 users. 

What is most valuable?

The interface is easy to use. It is not much different from iOS, but you can use it on a larger scale in data centers.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used Cisco Nexus for several years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Nexus works well. It's highly reliable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Cisco Nexus is scalable. 

How are customer service and support?

We've contacted Cisco support many times. They always help us fast.

How was the initial setup?

Nexus is straightforward. The time needed to deploy depends on what you're doing and your knowledge of Cisco systems. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Nexus is a costly solution. However, it's an excellent device, so you expect the price to be high. It has a three-year license. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Cisco Nexus nine out of 10. I recommend it. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Nexus
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Nexus. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Stable and scalable but needs to offer more integration capabilties
Pros and Cons
  • "You can scale the product."
  • "It would be ideal if there was better integration with various other platforms."

What is our primary use case?

The solution is our aggregation switch. We have all our data services, and users (not end-users) services going through our Nexus. It connects our firewalls and it connects other switches and makes our load balances work. Basically, we were given the switch and then we configured it and we will put it in the network and we maintain it.

What is most valuable?

The solution seems to be quite stable. We have had to upgrade recently as we were on an engineering release of code, and we don't tend to have problems with the Nexus. 

You can scale the product.

Technical support seems to be okay.

What needs improvement?

The solution could be improved in general in all aspects. 

When it comes to technical assistance, you cannot speed up things. You can try to escalate, however, there's a process. You have not got them on speed dial. You need to wait.

It would be ideal if there was better integration with various other platforms. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution since 2015. It's been six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the solution is great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance is reliable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution can scale.

The product provides services for thousands of our customers. If we look at Nexus and the media portals, then we've got millions of customers that will use the end service. That all goes through the Nexus F5.

How are customer service and technical support?

In terms of technical support, we would go through the third party who would contact Cisco. It's fine. It works quite well at the moment. It would be nice if they could be quicker.

How was the initial setup?

I did not handle any of the initial setup. I can't speak to if it was complex or straightforward. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I can't speak to the pricing as I am not in procurement. Once it gets delivered, we'll put it in the network and then we'll configure it and then operate it. We are in operations. We don't directly handle licensing.

What other advice do I have?

We are a customer and an end-user.

It's my understanding that we are using version 9, however, I cannot speak to if what we are on is the latest version or not. 

In our organization, there are hundreds of engineers. There are multiple teams. I work in a team that looks after the data center and we are on-premises, although there is also a cloud team.

From an operations perspective, when I look at service availability and the number of failures, I'd say the solution is probably about a seven out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users. It is tried and tested in our network, and it works well. It could work for other companies.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Network Design Engineer at Kent State University
Real User
Significantly increased our throughput and added redundancy to our data center
Pros and Cons
  • "We leverage Cisco DCNM a lot, which allows us to automate."
  • "Our only complaint is about the licensing because it can always be a little more cost-effective."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

Our only complaint is about the licensing because it can always be a little more cost-effective.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We handled the implementation in-house and asked our local Cisco engineer for help when needed.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Principal Engineer 2 at Charter Communications, Inc.
Real User
Has good performance, flexibility, configuration, and cost
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of Cisco Nexus is 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."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Network Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Top 20
VDC allows a single physical box to be used for dynamic purposes and VPC for more redundancy and flexibility
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution has introduced VPC, Virtual Port Channel, which allows for more redundancy and flexibility."
  • "There may be many bugs which remain unresolved."

What is most valuable?

Cisco Nexus introduced VDC, Virtual Device Context, meaning the person has a single physical box, usually one pair, for dynamic purposes. This pair allows one to create multiple logical switches, for totally different functioning. One could be for production, another for UAT, a third for Dev. Yet, we are talking about a physically single box. It has also introduced VPC, Virtual Port Channel, which allows for more redundancy and flexibility.

What needs improvement?

Cisco Nexus if focused primarily on the data center. While it has been in the market for nearly ten years, there are still many areas in need of improvement. There may be many bugs which remain unresolved. It is important for Cisco to be aware of the various issues it encounters and come up with new releases. 

The frequency with which this occurs can vary. It may take months, be done quarterly or, sometimes, after half a year has elapsed. There is still much to be done to increase their stability, something which can depend. 

The solution is relatively expensive when compared with Cisco Catalyst.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been dealing with Cisco Nexus since it first emerged around ten years ago. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

While this can depend, there is still much to be done to improve the solution's stability. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is relatively expensive when compared with Cisco Catalyst.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Nexus, which uses NX-OS, runs on a different operating system than CatOS, which means that the latter tends to run on OS - just like a Cisco router - only with the functioning being a bit different. While NX-OS is very different, even when it comes to the command line, most things are the same.

However, NX-OS already introduced a different concept, which is more like a carrier level. They have a dedicated command management module. All other modules have comparatively many more functions or power than regular Catalyst switches.

Nexus' primary focus is on the data center and supports what are known as top-of-rack or end-of-rack features, including the cost of cabling. So too, the latest one, the Nexus 9K, also supports a software-defined cloud with Cisco ACI, which is what this is referred to when typically deployed inside the company.

The solution is relatively expensive when compared with Cisco Catalyst.

What other advice do I have?

We are talking about a network portion. Catalyst and Nexus switches are all part of the network domain.

I rate Cisco Nexus as an eight out of ten, as it is a new platform. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Network Engineer at Applied Materials
Real User
Responsive technical support but need better certifications and training
Pros and Cons
  • "The setup was very easy, but managing it in operations was very complex."
  • "We lag on the configuration. The changes make a difference in troubleshooting."

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What about the implementation team?

We implemented Cisco Nexus through a consultant.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Another option was Aruba Networks.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Information Technology Network Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
A stable and scalable solution with good tech support which allows the managers to work unencumbered
Pros and Cons
  • "Tech support is good."
  • "The installation process lasted too long, taking 16 to 24 hours for full completion."

What is our primary use case?

I do not know which version we are using. 

What is most valuable?

The solution has good stability, so the technical team, the people handling the data center, are very comfortable with it and can push some policies as per the applications. So, I feel the solution to be okay. It really supports the management perspective. While it may not add value for the users, it enables the administrators to work freely. I am referring to the port network switches. 

What needs improvement?

The solution could be more user-friendly. 

It should have a more lenient cost. It could be cheaper in general. 

The installation process lasted too long, taking 16 to 24 hours for full completion. It should be faster. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Cisco Nexus for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is sufficiently stable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I feel the solution to be sufficiently scalable. 

How are customer service and technical support?

Tech support is good. There is no need for it to be improved. 

How was the initial setup?

Installation is unduly long, with the entire process lasting 16 to 24 hours. 

What about the implementation team?

We have around ten people managing these devices, consisting of managers, administrators and engineers. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution should be more cost-effective in general. There is an annual licensing fee. 

What other advice do I have?

The same 9,000 people connect daily to these applications in our data center.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. 

I rate Cisco Nexus as an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Cisco Nexus Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Cisco Nexus Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.