Time and time again I have customers wanting to understand the true benefit of a Cisco Nexus switch versus a Cisco catalyst switch in the data center for connecting servers. Customers may argue that they just need simple 1G or 10G speeds, dual-homed with a port-channel and they can achieve this simply using a stack of Catalyst 9300 or Catalyst 9500 switches. So here are a few reasons to ponder:
Code upgrade
If you have servers that are dual-homed for redundancy across two separate Cisco catalyst switches which are stacked because you want to leverage a port-channel then that sounds fine and dandy but when it comes time to upgrade the switch, because there will be a time you have to upgrade the switch, the whole stack will need to be reloaded resulting in an outage to your servers. This is not the case with Cisco Nexus.
Lower latency = better performance