Great article. Two things stuck out to me from it.
1) Article says that today's top-line routers only provide 1 Gbps. Whereas, I thought Cisco's top-line 12000 series provide 60 Gbps (I saw that on their website). Does anybody know how fast Juniper's M40 is? Just a crappy back-o-the-envelope calculation: M40 performs at 40 million packets per sec. If 1 packet is about 50 bytes (I know packetsize varies depending on protocol etc.), then that's 2 Gbps. So that makes Cisco's 12000 series faster than the M40. If Curtis or someone more technical than me reads this, please verify. So I guess my real question here is can you correlate packets per sec to gigabytes per second? Or are they two completely different things?
2) Quote from article: "Over the next few years, we'll find out who the next Cisco will be," Panditi said. "Now, no one knows."
IMO,more than likely, the next Cisco will be...CISCO. The little guys are catering to a niche market (rapidly growing to be sure), and more than likely will be bought out. It takes more than technology to sell to a service provider. It also takes a service organization. Cisco, Lucent, and Nortel have that. These little guys don't.
I'll tell you, though, what the little guys are doing sure is exciting stuff. I hope they scare Cisco and the others, so our technology will march ever onwards. I also hope at least Juniper goes public, so that we all can become Juniper shareholders as well as Cisco shareholders.
Thx for posting, PAL.
|
