On the Death and Rebirth of IOS — Why Did It Take So Long ?

The mar­ket has been com­ment­ing on the rise of Juniper for some years and the fact that Cisco has not been able to stop them grow­ing. Well, we can now see that Cisco was listen­ing to the stock mar­ket by spend­ing a lot of time and money devel­op­ing a new oper­at­ing sys­tem. Oh yeah, and some new hard­ware to run it on. Read all about the Cisco ASR 1000 here.

IOS per­form­ance limits

Its been clear for a long time that the con­ven­tional IOS had hit a wall in per­form­ance. The mono­lithic ker­nel has been sub­jec­ted to any num­ber of hacks to improve per­form­ance (fast switch­ing, CEF) but ulti­mately, it obvi­ously had to be dis­carded and a new approach built that sup­por­ted mod­u­lar­ity, improved upgrade, and other ser­vice­ab­il­ity fea­tures. This has seen the release of NXOS (Nexus 7000), IOS XR (CRS-​​1) and now IOS XE for the ASR1000. You can prob­ably also include IOS SX as used in C6500 and other switches as another.

Where now for net­work design

What might this mean for Network design and archi­tec­ture ? For the next year or two, it is mostly busi­ness as usual. Cisco likes to announce products with only lim­ited func­tion­al­ity in the early stages to mark out their turf, so you prob­ably shouldn’t rush to buy one unless you have some form of pas­sion­ate belief in the product. For example, BT have announced that the ASR 1000 will revolu­tion­ise some part of their net­work and they are going to buy lots of them. (No doubt with a nice dis­count and a lot of hand hold­ing by Cisco).

Network Management

One con­cern is how quickly the Network Management tools will adapt and adopt new meas­ure­ment and man­age­ment. The new oper­at­ing sys­tems means that tra­di­tional meth­ods of net­work sys­tem mon­it­or­ing will need revi­sion. Since Windows Server 2008 might be released soon, budget for soft­ware upgrades is going to be tight.

A second con­cern is whether they will work as advert­ised. Cisco has made enorm­ous changes to soft­ware test­ing and the num­ber of prob­lems with IOS is a frac­tion of years gone by, but still.…..

Better everything

The new IOS ver­sions offer us a lot of bene­fits. The focus on ISSU for spe­cific soft­ware mod­ules, run­ning two ver­sions for roll for­ward /​ roll back cap­ab­il­ity, check­point­ing are wel­come changes to the IOS strategy. I look for­ward to spend­ing less time per­form­ing upgrades in the middle of night.

Reluctant to cri­ti­cise IOS — but why so long ?

I won’t cri­ti­cise IOS for its past lim­it­a­tions, as they were neces­sary at the time. Remember that IOS was developed at a time of 2 MB flash RAM, 4 MB DRAM and per­form­ance was not an issue when 128 kbps was king. I will how­ever, be crit­ical of why has it taken Cisco so long to mod­ern­ise and update their core business ?

Cisco claims that it took five years to develop this new sys­tem. We had sim­ilar com­ments about the Nexus 7000. In my mind, Cisco should have had these products in place about two years ago. Procket was acquired in 2004 and formed the basis of the new ASR1000. Cisco has reg­u­larly been feted by the tech­no­logy press as a leader in buy­ing star­tups and integ­rat­ing their assets, but this isn’t neces­sar­ily a shin­ing example of speed to mar­ket or respond­ing to customer’s needs.

Conclusion

So fare­wall IOS, its been a ten year rela­tion­ship and its been sweet, if a little tir­ing and slow. l am sure to be spend­ing time with the new sys­tems and find­ing out about all their idio­syn­crasies and foibles. I have been dat­ing other net­work sys­tems though while you were put­ting on your makeup and I won’t be for­get­ting them in a hurry.

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