from network world, all guns on csco switching...
nwfusion.com
All guns on Cisco at Switching
Showdown
By Jim Duffy
Network World, 10/26/98
Atlanta - You can't blame Cisco for being defensive.
After all, everyone wanted a piece of the
internetworking giant at the Network World Layer 3
Switching Showdown during last week's NetWorld+
Interop 98 here.
The showdown, the sixth such presidential-style
debate Network World has hosted at major trade
shows, separated some of the fact from fiction
regarding Layer 3 switches.
In addition to Cisco, 3Com, Cabletron, Extreme
Networks, Foundry Networks, Nortel Networks and
Packet Engines participated.
The vendors fired pointed questions at each other and
responded to questions from a panel of industry
observers: Esmeralda Silva, LAN analyst at
International Data Corp. (IDC); Kevin Tolly,
president of The Tolly Group; and Jim Duffy,
Network World senior editor. The debate focused on
the price, performance, throughput and feature set of
this new class of internetworking product.
Cisco took the most heat for pricing. Layer 3
switches generally cost less than $700 per 100M
bit/sec port, but Cisco's Catalyst 8500 can cost up to
$2,000 per 100M bit/sec port, according to Cisco
product literature.
When asked how Cisco can market the 8500 as a
Layer 3 switch at that price, Vice President of
Enterprise Marketing Jayshree Ullal replied, "I want
to correct the fallacy that the 8500 costs $2,000 per
port. Depending on configuration it can be as low as
$1,000 to $1,200 per port. Second, I don't believe
the 8500 is simply a Layer 3 switch with fast
forwarding. It is, in fact, a wire-speed switch router
with full Cisco IOS services, features and nonblocking
capability, as well as the ability to add native ATM
switching and metropolitan-area network interfaces.
That, therefore, takes it well beyond a classical fast
switch."
Ullal added that Cisco's Catalyst 5500 and 2926G
switches can provide Layer 3 features at $500 to
$600 per port.
But Cisco wasn't going to get off that easily.
Bernard Daines, founder of Packet Engines, asked
Ullal how long Cisco can use its IOS software as a
"hammer" to force customers to buy overpriced boxes
that aren't wire speed.
Ullal replied, "IOS is really about providing consistent
command-line interface and software features, be they
quality of service, security, redundancy, high
availability, diagnostics or debug capability. It's not
meant to be an excuse for providing best-in-class
products. We have to, as a company, provide
best-of-breed products."
Cisco was also grilled on the positioning of its Layer 3
switches vis-à-vis its traditional software-based 7000
series routers, the highly profitable products that made
Cisco the internetworking leader it is today. IDC's
Silva asked, "Most of the panelists, including Cisco, I
suspect, plan to add WAN access interfaces and
multiprotocol support to their Layer 3 switches.
Where do you sell the 7000, and where do you sell
the Catalyst 8540?"
The 8500 line is targeted at the core of campus
networks, while the 7000's "sweet spot" is WAN
aggregation with channelized T-1 and T-3 interfaces,
as well as SNA and multiprotocol support, Ullal
replied. Cisco will be adding "convenience" WAN
support to the 8500, she said, but the company
continues to position the products as complementary
campus core and WAN aggregation offerings.
Ullal then took some jabs of her own. Of Cabletron,
she asked how the company could endorse flattened
topologies, then policy-based switching, and then
Layer 3 switching for increasing network
performance.
"How do you explain the contradictions of all three
strategies, and how are you rationalizing all three?"
Ullal asked.
"I don't see it as a contradiction at all," replied P.G.
Menon, Cabletron vice president of marketing.
"Unlike calling a Layer 3 switch a full-function router
and charging a premium, what we want to do is
provide the latest technology to our customers, right
away, at prices that make sense."
Ullal then blasted Nortel for forcing users to undergo
a hardware upgrade to get IPX support on Nortel's
Accelar switches. "How do you expect a customer to
have additional hardware at additional cost for an
additional protocol," Ullal asked.
Nortel has a discount program for current Accelar
customers who want to upgrade to IPX routing, said
Basil Alwan, vice president of product management at
Nortel. "I'm not sure if Cisco has installed Accelar
yet, but if you do we could offer that program to you
as well," Alwan quipped.
Vendors didn't save all of their digs for Cisco. Nortel
challenged 3Com to a Layer 3 switch bake-off after
claiming that 3Com's CoreBuilder 3500 can only
forward 48% of traffic at wire speed on a gigabit link.
3Com was happy to oblige.
"I think we would have to have a system test," said
3Com's Mick Seaman, chief technology officer for the
company's Large Enterprise Business Unit, jabbing at
Alwan's focus on per-port, rather than
aggregate-switch, performance.
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now seems to be more obvious now in what was said about competition and margin dropping. |
