Cisco Nexus Reviews

We primarily use the solution as a switch. We use it for our data center.

Cisco Nexus is a very powerful switch. 

We don't have any problems with Nexus, ever. It's very stable. We have been, for almost five years, using Nexus, and it has been virtually problem-free. 

It's smooth to use and very, very user-friendly. 

The GUI is very, very easy to maintain.

It's very easy to log in.

The reporting is quite good. It's easy to understand. 

Technical support has been very, very helpful and they offer good SLAs.

The scalability of the product is very good.

The solution is more expensive than other options on the market. HPE, for example, is a more affordable option. 

The renewal of support is quite expensive. 

We've used the solution for about five years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability is great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's 100% reliable. We've never had issues. 

The solution is very easy to scale out. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Technical support from Cisco is more than enough. It's very, very good. They are very fast and responsive and also very easy to understand. The response is good. We don't have issues with after-sales support Cisco. The SLA, service license agreement, is very, very good.

That said, the renewal for full support is very expensive for us. 

I did not handle the initial setup myself as I am not an engineer. Someone else handled that part. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult it might be. My colleague is much more versed in installation protocols. 

The solution, in general, is a bit pricey, and you need to pay extra for support, which can also be expensive. 

We're just a customer and an end-user. 

I would recommend using Cisco Nexus for those who want good performance, premium support, and easy maintenance. Cisco Nexus is a stable product in Indonesia. If a company is in the banking, oil and gas, or telecom industries, they should look into this product.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for Nexus in our company is for the data center. Everybody that has access to our remote server rooms throughout the campus wants 10G data ports all the way across. 

This product helps us by resolving the issue of not having to install fiber everywhere. If you use Nexus, it has the 10G copper ports. That way we can just use the current infrastructure. Cisco Nexus saves us money in the long run.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it scales well. It supports a lot of servers. We don't have to come up with different designs for anything. That's the best part about it.

I would like to have the feature where you can install something like operf on it so you can do troubleshooting without having to configure operf on servers.

We had issues with Cisco Nexus during upgrades. When we first got the system, we were having some issues. The whole system crashed. 

The stability of this product works great.

The scalability of Cisco Nexus is wonderful. It supports the whole data centers. We have no issues with scalability.

They need to understand that when we call them and have an issue, it's our production and sometimes they want us to do repairs that would cause other issues. That's the biggest problem.

We are a Cisco shop. We don't have to worry about learning different commands with Cisco Nexus. It still has different commands because of the platform, but it was a lot easier to understand than if you're going through a different company.

The initial setup was straightforward on Cisco's part. Other customers that we work with didn't understand their equipment.

We installed it ourselves. We just ordered our equipment through a reseller. They weren't involved in any on-site work.

It was Cisco or Juniper.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco Nexus an eight. When trying to do the upgrades sometimes there are issues. Sometimes you get a bug that Cisco doesn't know about. When you try to explain it to them, they always say it's impossible and can't be replicated.

You need to understand all the options, the servers and different applications you can run, and how Cisco Nexus supports the overall picture.

We use this solution as a core aggregated switch.

I can't say that it has improved our organization. We are moving away from this product because it is too much for what we have.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the power.

In the Nexus 3500, you can't do per-port Jumbo frames, so you have to enable it as a global configuration. This is a feature that should be added.

It is pretty stable, although I had the power supply go down twice in this past year. We replaced it the next day in both cases. We do have bad power where we are, so that could be a factor.

Scaling this product is on the pricey side. If you're a top-end enterprise company then you can scale it. You can stack it, or build a solution with redundancy.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.

We are switching away from this solution because it is too much for what we have. We will likely be dealing with CDW because they give us the best pricing. However, we have not chosen a replacement solution yet.

I was not involved in the implementation of our current solution. However, I have set up Nexus switches before and it is is pretty straightforward.

The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $800,000 USD annually.

My advice to anybody researching this solution is to really look at what you have. See if it actually fits into your environment. In our case, a previous employee chose this solution because we had the money. It was the biggest, top-tiered product. When I came in and took over the network, we realized that it is too much for what we have. We're just wasting money.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for our data center layer two, layer three, infrastructure.

Our main data center has been using this solution for the past twelve months and we have had zero outages. Before that, when we were using the Catalyst 6500 series, that was not the case. The stability of this solution is a major win. 

The most valuable feature is stability because in a data center you really need that.

The consolidation of all of the layer two ports into one rack is very valuable.

I would like to see more on-device programmability, as it seems to be lacking in this platform.

The EEM has limited capabilities compared to the Catalyst 9300 series, so this can be improved.

I would like to see better support for the newer front end tools, such as the DNS center.

Stability and availability is a definite plus on the Nexus platform. It seems to have better HA capabilities compared to the older platforms.

The scalability of this solution is better than that of the traditional models. You can always add more 2k switches to a 5k underlying chassis and increase the number of ports without any other configuration. There is no additional configuration required for FEX ports.

Technical support for this solution has always been the same.

The old solution was at end-of-life.

We were using the traditional Catalyst 6500 switches with the traditional iOS. It didn't provide us with 10-gigabit ports in the data center, which is why we switched to Nexus.

The initial setup was a little bit more complex because it was a new technology that we were adopting. The learning curve was a little steeper. However, the actual deployment was pretty straightforward.

We used a reseller, World Wide Technology, to help with our deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

We have seen ROI in terms of support and business continuity.

We are a Cisco shop, so we didn't look for an alternative platform. We knew that we were going to use Cisco.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to train their support staff on the Nexus product before deployment, and not after the fact. Once you deploy, if the support staff has to learn while on the job then it may cause issues. It is good to invest in training prior to the implementation, especially on this platform because it is very different than the traditional iOS.

The software upgrades are also different from that of the traditional Catalyst switches, so if you are not used to doing them on this platform then you have to be careful.

The other thing that I can say is that the scalability and stability of this solution have improved when compared to previous products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

From a data center implementation, with respect to competition from your data, there isn't really a product recovery for the different tests other than Cisco Nexus. For example, if you take Multi-tenancy for the data center, it's something which, I think, only Cisco has. There are some implementations from HP, but I think it's limited there.

One of the biggest challenges, which I see is that there's a constant evolution in the product. For example, our configuration is based on what is known as traditional data center implementation. Today there is the ACI deployment and to implement, to migrate from one technology to another, that's challenging both from a configuration perspective and also from a cost perspective. We have had a problem in an order of a batch of optics, which is practically failing. So that was about the average of optics, which caused us quite some problem.

We have been using Cisco Nexus Switches since 2017 or about four years.

This year, we have only experienced the problem once. Of course, it was not identified and I had a problem with OTB wiring and we experienced it just once. I stayed in kind of generic configuration, that's why we're like Cisco, because they are significantly stable.  If you don't try to do something fancy and they don't get problems.

We have also the advance services of Cisco to support us there. I think they are still better than some competition. But, I think, their quality has decreased. In the past week they were not very good. They have had better quality.

We work with our account manager to negotiate a good price, so overall, I think the pricing is fair.

I would recommend Cisco Nexus Switches. Of course, there is the ACI deployment and the challenges there. It is always a challenge to keep up with the technology. They are just constantly doing some updates and changes and becoming the modern marketer is challenging. So in the past fiscal year for data center and every JSS deployment things are much more complicated. I would give it an eight on a scale of ten, because of the problem which we had. I'm just thinking in respect of competition.

We use this solution as an aggregate router in our data center environment so that we can have an extended VLAN port between different data centers, regional and local.

The company has multiple data centers and most of the connections between them are through the 9K switches. We also have a couple of them in our lab for testing. These are used to test throughput, the system reliability, accuracy, and scalability for how many VLAN extenders we can have in our infrastructure.

We are using Spine-and-Leaf architecture for our data centers.

The most valuable features of this solution are scalability and throughput. We are extending the VLAN to multiple data centers.

We would like to see this solution support routing.

One of the problems we have is that there is no confirmation for when you try to test a system command. It just accepts it and does not give you a response.

Stability is very good. We have been using it a lot and for a long time. It is being upgraded all the time.

Our environment is very large. We have multiple regional and national data centers, where data is sent between them.

Technical support for this solution is very good. I have been working with them for a while. We have dedicated line support for HTTP.

The initial setup of this solution is not very complex. The problem is reliability. We get help from Cisco technical support and Cisco sales, and the deployment has to be coordinated with the Cisco architectural team to get it working on our network. There are a lot of people involved in the deployment, and before anything, it has to be tested.

We have advanced engineering, where they do the testing to make sure that the problems are being captured. If there are any issues then they are sent back to operations before they can deploy.

We use a Cisco consultant for deployment. They are a reseller for the whole region. Everything is taken from the warehouse, prepped, and tested to make sure that everything is working. Their response is very good, and we have been working with them for a long time.

Our licensing fees are paid annually.

The company is currently investing heavily in new technology from Cisco. This includes the SD-WAN, a network administration system, and NFV for the virtual firewall.

For this solution, we did not consider other vendors. However, we do use multiple vendors for our firewall and routing solutions.

For anybody researching this solution, I would recommend looking at the 9K, but you have to look at all of the metrics and compare them between vendors. This is the way to come up with the best solution. Everything, including technical support, has to be considered because, for example, you can have the product but if you don't have support then you are going to have to deal with issues by yourself.

Overall, this product is good, but nothing is perfect. It is important to have competition.

I would rate this solution a nine 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.