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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical The business side of the coin. WAS RE: The market must be coming back
I recall that, early in my career I had the opportunity to build a new LAN backbone for a 6 story office building. It was going to be Category 5! Woohoo. With a 12/24 fiber backbone. ATM in a LAN environment was new at the time but I was going to make sure I had an OC3 backhauling each of the floors to a central switch. I thought this design was beautiful and marvelous. There was a neat new company that made LAN-style ATM gear with performance specs that would just blow your mind. So when I took the design to the board they loved the fastethernet fiber blah blah and gave approval. But when it came down to selecting vendors for the hardware I ran right into a brick wall with questions like: How long has this company been in business? Are they using open standards? Do they have knowldgeable tech support? ..and so on. So, regardless of whether the hardware is the fastest thing on the block, pushing 10 nanobits at a megaflop, you can look like a fool if you don't consider the business repercussions of the vendor you choose. In the end, I didn't get my design approved until I chose Cisco. Was I pissed, sure! Did I ship off white papers and other propaganda to support my case? Yes! But the company went bankrupt about 2 weeks after I submitted the bid. Just my .02, Regards, Christopher J. Wolff, VP CIO Broadband Laboratories http://www.bblabs.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gary Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 12:37 AM To: Richard A Steenbergen Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: The market must be coming back Richard: > Personally I would say that Foundry does EVERYTHING less than perfect. > Nearly everyone I'm aware of (including myself) who has had to > misfortune to try and use their devices in a service provider > environment and a layer 3 role has come away with a universal loathing > of biblical proportions. Not worth a response. Can't please everybody and you CAN'T design everyone's network for them. Sort of like EIGRP. Even the worst network engineer can look great with it. Perhaps you should read JANOG. Maybe they can help you. Search for フアウンドリ。 (note, if you cannot read this, it is Japanese for Foundry in unicode). > I really can't stress this enough, it DOES NOT MATTER how many > gigabits your box forwards. A router is ONLY as useful as the quality > of its software and support, if you can't login to it or have working > routing protocols, it's just a big paperweight. The only "wannabe > cisco" company I have seen learn this lesson is Juniper, and I am > firmly convinced this is the reason for their success in the core. Juniper is an OUSTANDING company. Much better than many networking companies in many respects. I've also heard nothing but good things about Unisphere here in Japan, so perhaps this will be a good marriage with benefits to service providers. I'll enjoy competing. We will compete. > Whenever I read a press release about Foundry in the core, I stop and > take a moment to laugh uncontrollably. It has nothing to do with ISIS > or MPLS, it has to do with making your existing functionality work > correctly and behave in a sensible fashion. Nothing personal against > Foundry, but the people in charge couldn't possibly "not get it" any > more than they do now. Remember what you said in this paragraph. I will refer to it later. Yoroshiku, Gary
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