As our organization expands, we enter in to relationships with entities that have deployed switches from providers other than Cisco. From our experience, those platforms seem to have more issues with throughput or memory. Often we come across poor performance that gets cleared …
Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches are well suited for data closets in today’s ever expanding network system requirements. Today’s businesses rely on stable, fast, and highly available data connectivity. Businesses perform at such a quick pace now and the need to consume data resources is an integral part of most every business function. There can no longer be outages. Slow data connectivity and sluggish system response is directly related to business success. The Cisco Catalyst platform has provided our company with a network foundation that is fast and reliable so that the business can concentrate on what they do best.
We manage a lot of public infrastructure and schools which means we need reliable hardware that is easy to prep and install quickly due to time constraints. The price is great as we must keep a close eye on our budget.
We use these switches in all types of situations and configurations some are full SFP and others are ethernet but honestly the software and hardware are great for our usage.
The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches provide reliable connectivity for multiple client device types whether computers, phones, wireless access points, etc.
The Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches has deployment flexibility from traditional IOS-XE deployments to Cisco Catalyst SD-Access and now Meraki monitored solutions.
Multiple switch models allow us to customize each data closet deployment to exactly fit the port density and power-over-Ethernet requirements.
Wireless Access Points (APs) zero touch provisioning
Its high-end family (running the AOS-CX firmware) supports a virtualization technology called VSX (Virtual Switching Extension) which allows 2 switches to present itself as one virtualized switch under Layer 2, and as 2 separate routers under Layer 3; thereby providing high availability.
Software needs improvement, where features are added (Stack wise) or removed (GLBP) without solicitation from a wider audience or depreciation, respectively
Software bugs recently in basic features like AAA
Ability to turn off all unused services or features to reduce the attack surface
Cisco CoPP functionality is not like it was on the Cat 6k platform - users cannot create custom policies for use at the control-plane interface
I have had issues finding monitoring software that natively supports Provision/Aruba OS. Most are designed primarily with Cisco in mind.
HPE/Aruba switches have historically had issues with corrupt flash. This seems to be less common in more recent models.
HPE/Aruba's switching portfolio can be confusing. Some models run on the Aruba OS while some others run on Comware. There is some overlap in these model lines so at times is can be tough to tell which switch is right.
It is a very good product, has almost all the feature you can need to access switches, a simple web GUI management, but not all can be configured from the GUI interface.
The Catalyst switches definitely have a more robust feature set than the Meraki switches but the Meraki switches are intended for a different use case than the Catalyst switches. We used Catalyst switches in our wiring closets because they fit in better with the topology and feature sets that we wanted to deploy.
The HPE Aruba Switches are definitely easier to setup than Cisco Catalyst Switches. We prefer to have a managed interface, so the HPE Aruba Switches are a better option than most Netgear or D-Link switches. Compared to HPE Networking Switches, the Aruba models typically are cheaper and perform nearly as well
Stability - even 10 year old devices are still running and doing the job
Sometimes lines of products are on the market for a very short time (eg. 6800 instant access) - it is hard to buy equipment to make the network bigger.