Cisco Nexus Reviews

This solution is the backbone of our data center.

We have multiple tenants built on it, in a network-centric design. We have our Dev QA tenant, user acceptance tenant, production tenant, our DMZ, and then our user edge where everything comes in and goes out. We have firewalls in between all of the tenants, and we use ACI to microsegment between the networks, within the tenants. All of the intra-tenant traffic goes through the firewalls.

Prior to our deployment of ACI, everything was, essentially, flat open access. By using ACI we were able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment. At our data center, we are 99.99% virtual.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the virtual switches of our UCS platform. It provides a lot of visibility from the ACI console. The ability to tenant-out the traffic and segment it, without having to get into separate physical hardware or trying to figure out VDCs manually, has been really powerful and extremely useful for us.

I would like to see the usability improved by simplifying the user interface. For example, it would be nice to have a simple way to find endpoints and get information about them. It would be great if they could make the interface a little more user-friendly, but not trade power off for simplicity.

This solution has been very stable and functioning properly, and we've barely touched it since it went in. We've got a big project to start doing upgrades on it, but so far so good. We haven't had any issues with it as long as I've been at the company.

In terms of scalability, we haven't grown the deployment, yet, because we're nowhere near capacity. There is a lot of scalability in terms of what we could use, although it's a matter of what we actually need. It seems very scalable, but we just haven't had the need to scale up yet.

I have not had to speak with technical support yet, which speaks to the stability of the product.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly complex. That's one thing about ACI; it takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but coming from somewhere that had never worked with anything like ACI, it was difficult for me, initially, to grasp the complexity of it. Once I did, I realized that it's not actually as complicated as it looks when you first log in.

We have used a couple of consultants over the years. I believe it was BT that assisted with the original deployment, and it is Presidio that is working on our upgrade project.

My understanding is that the people from BT were great. With respect to Presidio, they know their stuff, and they seem to be putting together good, concrete plans for our system.

I believe that we have seen ROI. We have been able to streamline our processes dramatically because of the way that the new architecture works. While it was a large investment, I believe that it has had a big impact on the productivity of our systems, in general.

There are still a lot of things that we have yet to do with this system, in particular with the APIs and scripting. Also, there are a lot of additional features that we haven't had a chance to look at yet because we haven't upgraded.

Not a lot of people in my area are familiar with this solution. It is kind of new and scary, so a lot of people are a little wary of it. However, now that I've had some time with it, I find it very powerful. Having direct access to virtual switches is a huge advantage. 

My advice to anybody researching this solution is to take a good look at it because it is great for segmenting your network. Make sure that you get a lot of training as part of your deployment, including education on how it works and why the design is the way it is, or what the best practice design is if you're looking at creating your own.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution in our data center.

This solution has allowed us to scale bigger than ever.

The most valuable feature is that it is high-density, ten-gig.

The code quality for this solution has gotten worse and needs improvement.

The hardware is stable, but the code quality has gotten worse.

The scalability of this solution is great.

Cisco's technical support is great.

I have always used Cisco products.

The initial setup of this solution is complex, but that is expected. You have to put a lot of thought into it.

My advice to anybody implementing this solution is to plan ahead six months.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have a lot of customers that we implement Nexus platforms for.

This product is made for lossless data, so it's a very high-performance switch. If there's one place you don't want to lose data, it's in the data center. The 9Ks support speeds of 40-gigabit and 100-gigabit, today. They've got pretty good throughput in the box, they've got virtual output queues, things of that nature, which help contribute to the lossless data.

I like a lot about this solution. They are very high-performance switches and they are made for lossless data, so they're a good play in the customer environment. 

The 9K was developed to support ACI, the software-defined data center technology. For this reason, there is no feature parity between the 9K and the 5K or 7K, which means that it is harder to position the 9K to future proof them. If a customer wants to leverage their investment for ACI in the future then it is difficult. I know that Cisco has added some Fibre Channel over Ethernet capabilities to the 9K line, but there are some other features that it does not have capabilities for. For example, virtual device context is not supported. It would be really nice to see some capabilities like that added to the 9K line so that we can position them to future-proof our customers.

I understand why it is that they don't have some of the features from the older Nexus models, but we get into some scenarios where the customers need those features, and they have to go with a 7K or a 5K. Ideally, I would prefer to position a 9K if I could, to future-proof them and lead them along that path to ACI, eventually.

With respect to the stability, I can't think of any major issues I've ever come across with it.

I think that these units are made to scale, but it depends on how they're deployed. If they're deployed within an ACI environment and that's the customer's expectation, they work fine.

If they're deployed, say, a 9500 model in a non-ACI role, a traditional data center switching role, and the customer decides that they want a virtual device context then we could not support it in that scenario. In this particular case, it wouldn't really scale. That is why it's tough sometimes, in a non-ACI environment, to implement the 9K.

In general, Cisco has always got good technical support.

They're responsive, their people are always available, and they respond relatively quickly. Compared to competitors such as HP, Aruba, Dell EMC Networking, etc, the support from Cisco is always a head and shoulders above those other competitors.

There is some complexity to the initial setup of this solution.

There are a lot of facets to configure a network. It's one thing to configure VLANs and things like that, but when you're configuring quality of service, for example, on a Nexus device, it's all class maps, service policies, mapping queues, and things like that. There is no auto QOS functionality like you might have on a Catalyst switch line, so they're a little bit more complex.

It is not really a big deal because once people have worked with them a little bit, they master it and move on.

They don't see additional revenue from it, but they do see cost savings. With the 9K in NX-OS mode, there's still a lot of touch points with them, although the support for bash and pipe can really simplify that. In an ACI mode, certainly, there are savings because of the orchestration and automation that's occurring as part of the software-defined network.

Cisco's licensing structures can be complex across different technologies, for example, unified communications. The ACI licensing is not so bad.

As they are moving to the DNA Essentials, as opposed to the old Cisco One Advantage-type solution, it is adding a little more complexity to the licensing scenarios. But in general, I think that Cisco is moving toward synching everything up and trying to get everything licensed in a similar way, whether its a data center switch or a campus network switch.

I'm fine with where Cisco is moving to.

There are a lot of competitors out there. For example, the VMware NSX, which is a pure overlay, it's more network virtualization. The ACI solution is more full-featured, and you get visibility under the underlying overlay. It's very performing, and where we've deployed it for customers they are extremely happy with it. There's a learning curve in deploying it because you do things a little differently, but overall it's a solid solution.

When we lead with a software-defined data center, we lead with Cisco.

I'm a pre-sales engineer, and I help customers blueprint out and design their future data center. We really like this solution. It's a great switch. If there is a data center switch we try to lead with, it's the 9K. I like the Cisco ACI solution in general, that the Nexus 9K is a foundation of. I would certainly recommend it.

If a competitor like VM or NSX tries to position their solution and they try to say, "You don't really have to replace the network or re-design the network", that's not really true because the overlay is only going to be as performant as the underlay. If they deploy that technology on an old-age network that's not deployed in a spine and left topology, then the customer is going to have to do that anyway. The Cisco solution takes all of that into consideration as part of the deployment, so it is an optimized software-defined network when it's deployed for the customer.

Overall, they are a pretty good switch, although it doesn't have some of the features that some of the previous lines have had.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for a secure and reliable connection to our servers. We use Nexus to connect to servers with a large capacity and high throughput. The solution has high availability which is very important for us, and Nexus provides that.

Nexus provides the ability to visualize the servers and redundant components, like redundant supervisor modules and power supplies. The technologies like VPC (Virtual Port-Channel) really helps us to provide high availability, high throughput, and continuity to our services. That is what we want to achieve to keep our customers happy.

By improving the stability and availability it improves the way the company functions. That is what we were looking for. For very powerful equipment with a lot of throughputs and a lot of features to provide high availability.

For the Nexus solution features that we use most are the VDCs (Virtual Device Contexts) which are the virtual domain, and VPC for trunking and aggregation.

There is not much that needs to be improved at this stage. If it were possible to gain even more throughput and more port diversity, that can always be a benefit.

This solution has very good stability. The Nexus platform was selected because it is very stable with a lot of features. We are very happy with the products and the choice.

This solution scales a lot, easily. The 7000s have a huge capacity. The scalability will depend on the model you have, but the 7000s we have are very versatile. We have a lot of ports installed already and we can still add more.

I don't know if we used tech support. It could be that everything went so well that we didn't have to. But I don't know.

Previously, we had other switches (I don't know exactly which vendors as that was before I was with the company) and those were very a big investment. These new ones are not cheap, but provide more value for the money.

We had to go through different steps and that made the setup a little more complicated than it would have been if we could have deployed in one shot. We had to deploy in a few steps so it took more effort. It doesn't detract from the value of the end product.

We used partners to do the implementation. It was a very good experience. Their technical knowledge of the product was good and they integrated the box quickly. It was fast and good and would have probably taken us a lot more time had we done it on our own.

It is a bit expensive to get started. The solution is more expensive than most of the competitors for sure. But in the end, it is stable and provides a service and that meets our performance goals. So the ROI is very good.

When I came to the company they had already made their evaluations and the conversion project was already underway. I know they selected this because they felt it was the most stable solution. The route of Nexus had a lot of throughputs but it is also very reliable. We were looking for reliable, scalable technology. The point of making a change was to avoid failures and that is why we chose Nexus.

I rate the solution as a nine out of ten. The 7000 series switches, especially, I would put at nine out of ten. It is only not a ten because there is always room for improvement.

The Nexus platform is very stable. It has a lot of features and does not fail. So if you are looking for performance, stability, and reliability, the Nexus product seems to me to be the best solution.

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.

Our primary use case for Cisco Nexus is for our data center and for collaboration with other switches.

This product has improved the way our organization functions in the way we communicate with data from devices out there. Everything is on the radar if you deploy it on Nexus.

The most valuable feature of the solution is network visibility. It touches all of the switches. It becomes the core switch. All of the devices connected to it route towards it and so we're able to see all of the devices. 

Cisco Nexus is very stable. It's getting better now. The technology is moving to a fast and very innovative switch. It picks up all these new options and integrates them into the device. It's good for our infrastructure.

The solution's technical support is very robust. They're able to resolve any issues very quickly. There were not any issues that Cisco could not resolve for us so far.

We were using Nexus 6000 and now we're moving towards 9000. We switched because we are doing a cleanup. We are building up our infrastructure from the ground up, adding more new devices, revamping our infrastructure, and revamping our data center. It's just a need because we got too comfortable using our old devices, which are not supportive so we lost our patching. We ourselves were creating security holes. We have a need now for this solution.

The initial setup of the Cisco Nexus platform takes a long time. It's a complex system because we have a lot of security layers. 

We used a reseller for the deployment. 

We also looked at PCM. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco Nexus a good nine. Cisco is moving to new technology. It's more advanced. Anyone should invest in it. It's good.

We use Nexus primarily for our data centers.

It's pretty easy to use and operates at high speed.

The most valuable feature for us is its speed capacity.

Upgrade and promote catalyst switches to the Nexus, it's a lot faster.

As far as we can tell, it's stable.

They're pretty scalable.

All of our old stuff was end of life. We used Catalyst 4948 before.

The initial setup was somewhat complex. There were a lot of moving parts and we needed to get everybody going in the right direction. It didn't take very long though.

We used a reseller called Sirius for the deployment. They were pretty good.

We didn't look at any other vendors.

I would rate this product as an eight out of ten, because it's a pretty good product. It's stable and reliable.

It's definitely worth it.

This solution is the backbone of our data center. It is the fabric to our UCS blade servers.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a focus on backplane deployment, so you can stack more.

In terms of stability, this solution is rock solid. We've had no issues with it.

I would say that to make this solution more scalable, they need to provide a backplane as they do on a lot of their other network infrastructure equipment.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

We have been using the Nexus line for more than ten years. I don't remember what the previous model was, but it had good reliability and everybody knew how to use it, so we just upgraded.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

We used InterVision to assist us with the implementation, and they did an outstanding job.

This solution should be made more affordable.

This is a product that I recommend people look at, but it would be nice if it were more affordable.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.