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Cisco NX-OS

Score8 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cisco NX-OS?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses Cisco NX-OS

Cisco NX-OS Reviews

What users are saying about Cisco NX-OS.
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Cisco NX-OS Review

Incentivized
Maarten Kerkvliet
Manager of Engineering in Engineering at Quanza (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The main thing is that we manage our customers' network environments. And one of the main things is that we make configuration changes. We do operational support. So for us, it's key that the software that we use is stable, reliable, feature-rich, and so on.

Pros

  • I think compared to some other Cisco software releases, it's feature-rich, definitely for data center purposes.
  • We use it in many high-bandwidth situations where configuration and management are really key, and Cisco NX-OS supports some of it.

Cons

  • One thing that's disturbing me is that with a wide range of Cisco products, there are many different OSs used for Cisco. And sometimes it's really confusing that things are not always the same.
  • At the company I work for, we not only sell and manage Cisco products, but also those from other vendors. And some vendors seem to do a better job and keep things consistent.

Return on Investment

  • We do have some implementations on Cisco NX-OS and Nexus hardware, and some of these are already quite old, but they are still running pretty smoothly. So they are super reliable, in my opinion. So that's one of the very positive ways it impacts companies.

Cisco NX-OS is Highly Suited For Data Center Environments

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco NX-OS for some of our cores at certain sites. We also use Cisco NX-OS at some of our data server environments. NX-OS addresses the high availability, high modularity, and high performance needs for these type of environments in our organization.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • I would really love it for Cisco to unify the syntax of their operating systems. Most network engineers will be the most familiar with classic Cisco IOS based platforms since they are widely deployed at the access layer. Since Cisco NX-OS is less frequently deployed, the syntax change adds a steep learning curve to a lot of network engineers.
  • Cisco NX-OS syntax, depending on the version, can be a bit counter intuitive. For example, most network engineers are familiar with the "interface range" command in Cisco IOS. In some versions of Cisco NX-OS, this command is omitted and instead you have to use something similar to "interface ethernet 1/1 - 4". Another good example, is the "show ip int vrf interfaces " command found in Cisco IOS. For some reason, in Cisco NX-OS, Cisco decided to change this to "show ip int brief vrf ". I wish Cisco would choose one universal version of the command on all platforms. More specifically, I wish Cisco NX-OS would use the same Cisco IOS command verbiage.
  • Since Cisco NX-OS appliances will typically be deployed in more critical parts of your network, such as data centers, I wish that Cisco NX-OS had built in commit-check mechanisms before applying critical configuration changes. For example, in one of my previous jobs, I worked with a network engineer that was very familiar with Cisco IOS but relatively new to the Cisco NX-OS platform. They were staging a new network device and they were uplinking it to some of our Nexus switches. Something wasn't working for them and they decided they needed to tag the native vlan on a specific trunk interface on one of our Nexus switches. While in interface configuration mode, under that specific interface, they typed "vlan dot1q tag native". This is a global command which means it effectively tags the native vlan on EVERY trunk interface on the switch. Because they were applying this command in interface configuration command, they were under the impression they were applying to that specific interface only. This caused an outage which I then had to fix. It would be extremely helpful if Cisco added some type of commit-check that would inform the user that they are about to apply this change globally to every interface trunk or if they didnt permit this type of command to be executed in interface configuration mode and force the user to apply it in global config mode instead.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Juniper EX Series Switches and Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS)

Other Software Used

Cisco IOS

Cisco NX-OS Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the product for our data set. The idea there is that we need, well I guess the problem we face is that we have a lot of servers that need fast network communication. The idea is that using this platform, we achieve cut through switching and we have no downtime. The platform's robust, it ticks a lot of boxes around security, efficiency, scalability, some of the best out there.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • To me, there's nothing but positives for our business objectives when we use the Cisco Nexus platform. We need that reliability and we need resiliency, we need scalability, and we need a lot of uptime. And that's where the dashboard promotes all those things for us. And we see positives in terms of we don't need a hundred network engineers to manage the platform, we just need two. So it gives us a lot of room to grow in other areas of the business, but not just chasing our tails with silly problems and just a lot of headcounts.

Highly-Secure Network Performance Management Cisco Product with Unique Features.

Incentivized
Rahim KhanView profile
DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at Gumtree Australia (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco NX-OS starting was very easy and effective through its clean, professional interface full of multiple and very functional components. Ability on networking and network monitoring Cisco NX-OS is among the best solution and its reports are reliable and easy to provide. Management of various operations this tool was the best and very responsive features with various capabilities.

Pros

  • Easy to manage different networks.
  • Performance and problem identification.
  • Excellent reporting Cisco platform.

Cons

  • To monitor different network with the package is not that easy.
  • Multiple issues management.
  • Setting advanced functionalities on Cisco NX-OS is a complex process.

Return on Investment

  • It was amazing preparing different reports.
  • Networking through this system is incredible.
  • Data modeling and performance management is excellent.

Other Software Used

Huawei OceanStor, NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays, Acronis Files Connect

Has an Incredible data center.

Incentivized
Olivia Sarr MathewsView profile
Network Engineer in Information Technology at ActioNet, Inc. (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My experience with Cisco NX-OS dates back to about five years ago, using it to prevent network outages and optimization of networks. My team uses the software to gain visibility into network data and ASIC telemetry. We have integrated Cisco NX-OS with other DevOps automation tools to simplify all NX-OS programming.

Pros

  • Configuration is easy because it uses standard APIs.
  • Cisco NX-OS has a flexible architecture for all scalable workloads.
  • Performing segment routing is quite simple.

Cons

  • Vulnarable to attacks if not used along a SOAR or SIEM software.

Return on Investment

  • The company builds production applications and networks in a more cost-effective way.
  • Network resources usage with more efficiency.

Other Software Used

Splunk SOAR, IBM Security QRadar

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