Cisco IOS, presently in its 15th edition, is a network operating system for service providers and enterprises alike.
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FreeBSD
Score 9.0 out of 10
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FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. A large community has continually developed it for more than thirty years. Its advanced networking, security, and storage features have made FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.
Well suited for building management networks across the organization as it has been reliable without much downtime. Since it has great switching qualities, it suites well for data center and end-user connectivity using access switches. It might not be the best for routing, as other XOR software has proven to be superior for routing.
FreeBSD is the closest to a UNIX style operating system. This has been extensively used by vendors in the field of routing, switch and security as their base operating system. This speaks for itself being a reliable, scalable and secure operating system.
By this point, there are several "flavors" of the Cisco IOS such as XE, XR, and the standard Cisco IOS. While they are all fairly similar, there does exist syntax differences between them. It would be ideal if at some point in the future, Cisco is able to unify all of them into one standard operating system which would use the same syntax across all platforms.
While overall Cisco does a great job of QA'ing their IOS, no matter the release, there's always some minor bugs. I think it's important that Cisco continue to pour resources into their QA team to test their software.
While I'm very familiar with the graphical readouts of "show processes cpu history" I would love for Cisco to eventually find a more intuitive way to display this data. I can't begin to count how many times I've had to teach more entry level (and even mid level) engineers how this graph is interpreted.
I do wish that Cisco had something similar to Juniper's "commit check" or "commit confirmed". This helps validate the changes you're about to apply, and catch errors, so that you have a better idea of the impact of the change.
The data that Cisco IOS is able to provide is extremely relevant, it's fast, and it's intuitive. I also love that you're able to leverage things like macros or EEM scrips to run multiple commands at once. This is especially useful when you have more junior or entry level engineers in your environment and you want to provide them with a "shortcut" by having them type a single command to execute multiple commands.
Cisco IOS is the most stable I've used, has the best TAC support, has the best knowledge base articles and white papers from Cisco, is the most intuitive, is one of the fastest, and since it's the most widely used network appliance OS, chances are that most network engineers you encounter will have the most familiarity with Cisco IOS than with any other vendor's OS.
FreeBSD was the only operating system out of many I tried to install easily on older hardware and to run in a very performant way. For example, I had a lot of trouble trying to get Ubuntu to install on older hardware and when it did, it was too slow to use. FreeBSD installed quite easily and even after installing a desktop such as XFCE - it still run surprisingly fast. I was very impressed with it's performance, which it seems is a goal of the FreeBSD project.
Cisco IOS has had a positive impact in how quickly we're able to mitigate issues and outages due to how fast it's able to display the exact data we're looking for and because how the relevant that data is.
Having a stable operating system means less network issues and less outages. It goes without saying how valuable this has been for our organization.
Fantastic TAC support from Cisco! In the rare instances that we're faced with a very complex issue, or unfamiliar territory, Cisco TAC has historically done a phenomenal job of assisting us and getting us sorted!
