Cisco IOS, presently in its 15th edition, is a network operating system for service providers and enterprises alike.
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Oracle Linux
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Oracle Linux, which is application binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is free to download, use, and share. There is no license cost, no need for a contract, and no usage audits. 24/7 enterprise-grade support is available for business critical environments. A single support offering includes virtualization, management, HA, and cloud native computing tools such as Kubernetes and Kata Containers, along with the Linux operating system. The vendor states that as the only Linux…
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.
As a result of the migration from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Linux, overall application performance was improved significantly. Oracle Enterprise Linux is pretty much based on the Red Hat Linux code, although it receives faster and more regular updates from Oracle. They have better security configurations. However, it is also missing a lot of packages that are usually available in other distributions.
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.
Quick & [on-point] response is what I would say for the support team. There hasn’t been trouble ever since we get in touch with them and ask for help for any major or minor trouble we have been facing. Moreover, the team is very accurate with their solutions and detailed orientated. With such [a] high-performance application and agile environment, a team as such is great at hand.
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.
Oracle Linux became the obvious choice amongst its competitors due to its speed, agility, flexibility, and support from Oracle engineers. The ease of use was one of the major reasons for choosing Oracle Linux over the above-operating systems. Also, the cost of operations, management, and retention were significantly quite low. This made Oracle Linux a very easy and quick choice for our organisation.
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!
