Cisco NX-OS vs. HPE Aruba Networking Operating System

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.

Incentivized

Aruba Wireless works quite well and is stable for enterprise. Once it's running, it works. Once you have it set up, you don't normally need to go in and make changes. Aruba is particularly good on pushing clients to use 5ghz (they say they use some kind of a proprietary algorithm). It may not be appropriate for smaller businesses due to cost and complexity

Incentivized

• Cisco NX-OS does a great job of supporting high dense environments due to Cisco NX-OS based devices having some of the fastest packet switching performance
• Cisco NX-OS supports high bandwidth environments really well due to the high throughput links that are typically found in Cisco NX-OS network appliances
• Cisco NX-OS provides some of the best redundancy in the way of "Active-Active redundancy" via it's VPC technology. This is especially desirable in data center environments.

Incentivized

• Wireless Access
• Security/Role Management
• Firewalling
• Centralized Management

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Documentation on Aruba website is very lacking
• Support is hit-or-miss - they may waste a lot of time before you get to someone who has a solution
• Some configuration items are very non-intuitive

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Aruba does quite a good job with GUI configuration, especially with AOS 8 - something that Cisco struggles with (maybe they came up with something new now). Aruba can also easily scale. While not on the same level, Ubiquiti has a good GUI but is lacking a good standard controller - users have to stand their own.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Cisco NX-OS has provided extremely high availability in our organization; especially when we've had to perform upgrades. We've been able to leverage their ISSU technology to perform system upgrades/downgrades with no downtime
• Cisco NX-OS has allowed us to leverage high throughput packet forwarding for all of our application needs. I can't remember the last time anyone has complained about slow application speeds in my environment.

Incentivized

• Good return on investment in terms of a working wireless network for thousands of users
• However, troubleshooting and support may be difficult
• Good integration with ClearPass

Incentivized