Cisco NX-OS is a network operating system presented as a solution to help network operations move at the speed of business, with comprehensive automation, extensive visibility, and flexible open architectures for data center networks. NX-OS is the network operating system for all fabric architectures, from traditional L2/L3 to overlay-based fabrics.Cisco NX-OS powers the modern data center.
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FortiOS
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Fortinet’s operating system, FortiOS, is the foundation of the Fortinet Security Fabric, an OS designed to consolidate many technologies and use cases into a simplified, single policy and management framework.
This easy solution can be a great help for the big companies on easy multiple data processing and effective networking solutions for the various departments and also generating the real-time data reports with Cisco NX-OS is excellent. For the new users, it takes no time to become a pro on full manipulation of the features and offer the best and quality management services.
FortiOS is a great platform for deploying multiple FortiNet products and solutions in your environment that are operated under a single management console such as FortiManager. Automation and Orchestration become a reality with its simple API and FortiOS's ability to work with 3rd party API capabilities. FortiOS makes it simple to operate Fortinet's next-generation firewall features such as intrusion detection, SD-WAN, and Identity then consolidates them under a common management interface.
I think one feature it does really well is the virtual port channel feature. We have a lot of switches around the place that don't necessarily do port channeling really well. The Nexus platform comes in using the VPC feature, we're able to have multiple servers and then user devices connected, which gives us a lot better resiliency and scalability. Availability, it's easy to use, easy to maintain. Downtime is almost minimal. I think without a particular feature we would be stuck, so it's very good.
I think one thing we'd like to see a bit more in the Nexus space is probably the troubleshooting features. So one would be the I perf feature and being able to test network traffic across links. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of really good features in terms of troubleshooting, but one particular one that we like to see is where we can test network traffic. We can make sure that we have good latency, we got good bandwidth utilization as well. For us that's a big one. We've got to use third party tools to do that. So if the NXOS platform can do it, that's one of the thing we've got to do.
NX-OS has many similarities with the traditional IOS which is quite beneficial when it comes to configuration and learning. As a native Linux system, there are a lot of tools and features that can be enabled for any use case.
Our switches running NX-OS have provided solid consistent throughput. We haven't had any issues with it not being able to handle what we threw at it. The latency is extremely low. It also has multiple management options that we hope to pursue in the future.
Cisco support never fails me. In terms of timely response, no one is on par with them. They really value the impact of having technical issues and potential business stoppage. Also, their support staff are well equipped with knowledge and skills and easily resolve the most common incidents. Most of the time, we can resolve an issue by just calling them once.
I am much more familiar with the commands in Cisco IOS as it has been around for many more years. I know why NX-OS is a different system and can see the benefits of the fibre channel integration, but I do not understand why the commands had to use a different syntax. With the Nexus switches you don't get a choice of operating system unfortunately.
FortiOS was easy to learn and came with our Firewall purchase, therefore it was the logical choice. It became evident early on that the FortiOS and security fabric would make our migration quicker and easier from our current legacy platforms. Utilizing tools such as FortiConverter allowed for virtually error-free migrations.
Up to now, we haven't had a major ground-shaking attack on our networks but we take no chances by using NX-OS alongside a SIEM. All endpoints and workloads are secure so I would say we have plenty of trust in their security model.
