Cisco IOS, presently in its 15th edition, is a network operating system for service providers and enterprises alike.
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Oracle Solaris
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Oracle Solaris is a Linux operating system which was originally developed by Sun Microsystems and became an Oracle product after the acquisition of Sun in 2010.
I've worked with several network device vendors in my 10+ years of being in the industry and my favorite continues to be Cisco IOS. Overall, Cisco IOS tends to be the most stable, the most intuitive, has the best TAC support, and has the best knowledge base articles and white papers.
Oracle Solaris is great due to the fact that it actually is meant for high-end servers. Supports a wide range of hardware. The Stability of the solution is great. The documentation does not support some solutions, and there are no other options. Most of the product is still command-line, despite the fact that they've got a graphical user interface in some areas. For some reason, core administration is still done via command-line.
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.
We have found other Cisco software to be filled with added functionalities as compared to iOS. New NCS software has certain programmability features that are advantageous to legacy iOS software but are more complex to use for some users. Hence, we still have most areas of the network that functions using iOS software.
Oracle Solaris is Scalable, have a good patching capability and secure by default. You want to have something that's up and running and stable, something that's not going to crash. But if we do have an issue, we can get somebody for technical support who can help us work through the problems.
