What happened to IOS software stability?
June 27th, 2008 | by Ivan Pepelnjak |When I started working with Cisco 15+ years ago, the software was rock solid; we had routers running Cisco software release 9.1 with uptimes of several years. This heaven-on-earth situation didn’t last long, though. Trying to fuel its growth, Cisco focused more on features than on quality or stability, and IOS release 10.0 was the last one I worked with where routers would run for months without a glitch. (This change in focus roughly coincides with the marketing move to re-label the software as IOS.)
After plenty of customer complaints, things got back under control. Cisco stopped inserting new features in the mainstream code, and split each major software release into (at least) two branches: the “mainstream” release would receive only bug fixes, and the “technology” release would be improved constantly. Finally, the General Deployment (GD) status would indicate that the IOS release is stable and ready.
Would you care to guess which is the last GD release? If you bet on 12.4, which was introduced in October 2005, you’re dead wrong. The last IOS release to get the GD designation is 12.3, released in 2003 and reaching GD status in August 2007, which means that you have to run five-year-old IOS software if your business rules require GD.
To make matters worse, Cisco will no longer tell us what it considers stable The 12.4 release will never get GD status. Cisco has replaced the GD designation with “a number of product, solution, and system testing programs which provide customers a more complete and robust set of solutions and designs that utilize Cisco’s comprehensive IOS release portfolio.” In my next post, I’ll describe my reservations about this change. In the meantime, it looks like system integrators (and our customers) are left to decide what software to use on our own.
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