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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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution mainly used in commercial data centers.
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.
I guess to give it more context, my first job in the Linux ecosystem was in web hosting. And that was basically a Cintas shop and it was all run extremely lean and very bootstrappy do it on your own. You don't get any support. And for that environment, it was kind of just the way it is. It's very cutthroat. You have to move super fast. Once I moved over to the corporate side, every company I've worked with has been on rail. And the thing that really kind of makes it the best choice compared to using another operating system, another flavor of Linux and just kind of figuring out your own is the amount of support that Red Hat gives rail as far as extra tools like Satellite Insights and what's coming up now with Ansible and especially Ansible. Lightspeed, but also SLAs and stuff like that. Because yeah, I mean it was good learning in that first environment because there were no tickets, there was no support. It was figured out. But nowadays it's just nice to have an SLA agreement. I can just open a ticket. I say that that's something that does really well, but I also want to see it expanded, just more like vendor support at an enterprise level. I'm not sure yet what that would mean. I just have that every time we come up for renewal, I look at the price tag and it's like, what else can we do here? I like what Red Hat is doing just more.
For us, it's going to be the deployment and the patching. It does a good job because you can put your no reboot tags and things like that because working with production systems and so we don't want them just rebooting suddenly because they were patched in the Linux world. So the non-reboot tags and the operating system deployment is the biggest thing we find that saves time and that's the biggest thing that we like. The tools. The tools that save time.
From an automation perspective. RHEL is really moving forward, but some of their ideas are still not ideas, but their implementations of it still feel half-baked, like the functionality's there, but it's not the kind of functionality that to me makes it a full-on solution with OpenShift in particular as we're bringing this in and we're getting more into containers because it's more important for the banking industry and other industries. Justice General, well you can do this by script and we don't have an interface for this and sort of things sort of like that. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that RHEL does that bothers me as a general rule.
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.
RHEL has most of the features that are required by an ERP solution. If you need any additional packages, RHEL has a great repository and a very easy package installation/upgrade process.
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.
Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
When compared to these data center switches, I think Cisco Nx-OS based data center switches fare very well in terms of performance and reliability. When looking and talking about security, Cisco and Juniper Junos are comparable but Huawei switches lag in terms of security due to various reasons like who owns and controls them.
The biggest thing about RHEL that makes it stand out for enterprise users is the support that we get from the vendor. Whereas with the other ones, you're basically left on your own. There's no official repo, there's no satellite for patching. You're very left on your own with the community.
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.
Auditors are happy that we use an enterprise class distribution
Patch process is easy and fairly predictable
Information Security is fully satisfied with the speed of the fixing the errata and general state of the security patches, including the backporting process
