Posts by Anonymous 3

Smoke and mirrors hiding a failparade.

Sounds like a complete and utter fail for sun to have a "networking enabled" cpu with built-in 10GbE interfaces, and not manage to capitalize on it for years on end. In fact, making use of that facility still requires an *optional* expansion card in the box!

Moving on, while it's entirely possible and in fact not unlikely at all, that vyatta has a point about performace, much of this is smoke and mirrors. For example, as the linked comparison from 2008 implies: Cisco list prices are complete bunk, moreso than elsewhere. If you pay that you've been well and truly shafted. Next is that cisco sells very specialised tools, and that's always a bit on the spendy side. They probably could do a bit better there, so a bit more competition isn't a bad thing. But the price of the hardware is not that important, really.

The real beef isn't in how well the hardware performs at what price. It's in how confident you might be that it won't give up on you. This stuff isn't your average desktop gear; it lives in places more remote than the servers in your datacentre, spread out over more places, and even less accessible. And when they falter there's more pressure to get the thing going again, quickly! That's why you configure the things over boring old serial, simply because that is indestructibly simple. Which again is why I require a hardware serial on the laptop used to configure that sort of thing. So you'd ideally want right exactly another of the same boxes, restore the last known-good config, and off you go. Re-engineering the network _isn't_ something you contemplate in emergencies.

Can this outfit duplicate all that? How are they at technical support, fault-finding, release engineering the software, special needs branches? What about obscure weird parameters that you might someday need to make the network work at all? And so on?

This isn't to say that there isn't a market for this kind of thing. Just that this article doesn't discuss even half the issues that are relevant to running an enterprise network. Vyatta doesn't seem to have that firmly in focus, either. They need to fix that to enable sustainable growth in that market.