ICOS release for the Aurora 720 switch.

The Aurora 720 switch is available with ICOS NOS for the deployment.

What is ICOS?

Official introduction – ICOS is a fully hardened networking OS specifically designed to run on Broadcom® StrataXGS switching silicon for datacenter applications, including spine/leaf deployments. ICOS supports traditional management options including an industry-standard command line interface, SNMP, and Linux server ecosystem tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Linux shell. ICOS runs on several control plane processors such as MIPS, PowerPC, and x86, including Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms. ICOS is designed to be a network OS running as a service on stock server-class Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu. ICOS is a full-featured networking OS for datacenters and includes advanced layer-2 features such as MLAG, layer-3 features such as VRF-Lite, and SDN features such as VxLAN, OpenFlow, and OpEN API.

 

In normal words – ICOS is the reference stack from Broadcom, used by all tier-2 network vendors, such as Accton/Edge-Core and Quanta.

It’s a set of Linux packages, the vendor need to adopt for a particular switch platform for the correct fan/power/LED management.

 

Pros:

–          Traditional CLI management, like Cisco and Juniper.

–          Proven network stack from Broadcom.

–          Lowest cost for NOS.

–          Strong Linux shell integration on x86 platform

Cons:

–          Support depends on Broadcom, which is not the fastest company.

 

Conclusion: a good option for many networking applications with solid protocol set and widely-used CLI structure.