This is pretty bad for CSCO. CSCO losing in the LAN mkt segment also. With all these real competitions, look for CSCO to be down substantailly from these high valuation. Also, currently CSCO has PE of more than 100+, their historical PE is around 60.
--------------------------- article from network world
Foundry steals Cisco load-balancing
customers
Complete Foundry switch has an edge over
dedicated Cisco box.
By ROBIN SCHREIER
HOHMAN
Network World, 03/15/99
SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Feisty Foundry Networks
is winning over some Cisco server load-balancing
customers, replacing the dedicated Cisco box with
more general purpose Layer 3 and Layer 4 switches.
Based on low prices, shrewd marketing and a
versatile product line, Foundry has been convincing
some IT managers to replace the aging Cisco Local
Director with Foundry's ServerIron 10/100/1000
switch.
"It's not that Local Director is an awful product," says
Matt Davis, manager of corporate NT operations at
Republic Industries. "It's a very basic low-end
product without a lot of the functionality you can find
on the Foundry products."
Davis was using four redundant pairs of Local
Directors for nearly a year to distribute traffic on the
company's Web sites. That's no small task, because
Republic Industries owns National CarRental, Alamo,
CarTemps USA and AutoNation, which itself owns
hundreds of new car dealerships across the U.S.
Hello . . . Cisco?
So you would think Cisco would pay attention when
Davis put in a trouble ticket, but he says that didn't
happen. He says Republic wasn't able to successfully
balance more than two or three Web sites, mostly
because Local Director forces the creation of virtual
LANs for load balancing.
"We never got a Cisco engineer out here to address
the problem," Davis says, despite opening three
trouble tickets with Cisco. "They'd tell us there's
something wrong with our NT servers, with our
routers."
Davis says the problem was that Republic's Web
servers are rigged for both the Internet and the
internal network, a configuration the Local Directors
couldn't handle.
So when a friend recommended Foundry, Davis took
a look. He wound up replacing the Local Directors
with ServerIron switches and plans to put in about 15
of the Foundry boxes by year-end. "We tested with
Foundry's switches in the same configuration, and it
works like a charm," he says.
The same thing happened at New Watch Co., a
reseller of watches on the Internet.
"A friend of mine who runs an ISP is a big proponent
of Cisco," says Jeff Helms, vice president of
engineering at New Watch. "He buys all Cisco, and
for him to tell me that ServerIron was a better piece
of equipment than the Cisco Local Director meant
something."
Helms ultimately replaced two Local Directors with
two ServerIron switches to distribute traffic in front of
a server farm comprising six Compaq dual-processor
400-MHz rack-mounted servers. The network is all
Windows NT with 10/ 100M bit/sec connections.
"The Local Director doesn't have as much throughput.
It doesn't have near the capabilities for testing whether
or not your servers have gone down, or whether
they're currently functioning properly," Helms says.
"Local Director's kind of gotten long in the tooth,
technology-wise," says Dave Passmore, president of
consulting firm NetReference.
Not only that, the market is changing. "The thought
that people need a separate product for that rather
than combining [a load balancer] into the switch or the
router is not particularly attractive," Passmore says.
Meanwhile, Foundry's on the fast track to an initial
public offering for this spring, and the company's
counting on making more inroads into server load
balancing.
New Watch's Helms puts it this way: "We've got the
Local Directors as paperweights right now, if
anybody wants to buy them."
=====================
customer said to use as "Paper Weights" !!
will you not be curious as to what those thousands of engs are doing in csco when a customer said something like this. |
