CBS1300 Front Panel Stacking

[waqaryonis53]

Hi,

I found a post on reddit to stay away from stacking C1300 switches.
Looking for experience of the crowd here, is it really unreliable in production environment.

I only have experience with 9K stacking, so looking to some insights.

[Jens Albrecht]

Hello @waqaryonis53,

in general Catalyst 1300 stacking is considered less reliable and more limited in features compared to Catalyst 9K stacking.

The stacking in Catalyst 1300 is geared for SMB or very simple branching and small environments that only need basic edge aggregation. So if you only need basic stacking features for straightforward deployments, you could consider the Catalyst 1300 switches.

They are not suitable for critical campus/core roles where you need high reliability, fast recovery times and advanced features.

For example there is no SSO (Stateful Switch Over). Unlike Cat9K, the Catalyst 1300 do not support seamless hot standby failover.

The main advantage of the Catalyst 1300 is the price tag, of course. So for simple edge or cost-driven environments (SMB, small branches), Catalyst 1300 stacking can be acceptable if the risks are understood and planned for. For everything else stay with the Cat9k.

HTH!

[balaji.bandi]

CBS and Cat 1300 are different , again Cat 1300 has tested and reliable on stacking is good, until you hit with any bug or misbehaving as user or used point of view.

[Rich R]

> Cat 1300 has tested and reliable on stacking is good,
How do you know this @balaji.bandi - have you tested it yourself?
If not can you cite any documents attesting to this?
It's a completely new Linux based operating system (not IOS or IOS-XE) for a start which is our main concern with the product.
Trying to engage with the Cisco BU and SMEs got zero response - they don't seem to care about supporting it at all, so we raised this as a very serious concern with our account team and the reason we cannot consider using the product.

> until you hit with any bug or misbehaving as user or used point of view.
Have you had specific bugs and/or support issues with it? 
That seems to contradict you saying tested and reliable/good?

[balaji.bandi]

I may need to correct my statement here; I believe Cisco has tested and released based on the documentation. (I am going here, black and white document).

That seems to contradict your statement about being tested and reliable.  - Let me correct the above statement,  but you mean to say, as per your comment, vendors like Cisco release the product without proper testing into the market and let users test it (as a tester). As you mentioned, this is a serious concern for a Cisco buyer.

I may need to agree here that the new Firmware on these boxes is not the one we regularly use.

[Rich R]

Ok thanks @balaji.bandi 

So @waqaryonis53 my impression is that this kit has been built, and is supported, to a similar standard to what you would expect for consumer grade home user equipment or small business at best.

So if you are considering using the product then recommend very thorough testing because it is evidently not intended to be standard Cisco enterprise grade equipment.  Because it runs a different OS that means it will not leverage the extensive experience and support that IOS-XE based products get, and you're likely to encounter new and interesting bugs.  It's not clear how much priority Cisco will give to fixing bugs in the product when you find them.