[c-nsp] Which one? 6500 or 7600

[Jared Mauch]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:02:04AM -0800, gmb wrote:
> --- David Prall <dcp at dcptech.com> wrote:
> > Definitely talk to you Account Team. The 6500 (SX)
> > will run on all, while
> > the 7600 (SR) will only run on 7600 when SRB is
> > released. The two are going
> > in different directions. 6500 Enterprise and 7600
> > Service Provider. What
> > that means I don't know, plenty of Service Providers
> > require Enterprise
> > features and plenty of Enterprises use Service
> > Provider features. But with
> > this new direction, hopefully we will start getting
> > features faster, since
> > each code base will be focused on specific features
> > for who they believe are
> > their customers.
> 
> It's clear that 7600s are going very fast towards
> their GSR/CRS brothers both feature-wise and
> price-wise. So these boxes would get interest from big
> telcos and definitely loose the position of being a
> decent router for reasonable price.
> 
> Now the most important question here is whether the
> 6500 team decided to artificially degrade the 6500
> towards a dumb enterprise switch. Hope the answer here
> is no; otherwise it means that the whole 6500/7600
> split is just an attempt to kill the possibility to
> use 6500s as routers and force customers requiring
> moderate SP featureset to pay premium prices.

	I suspect this is more likely the case.  We'll see what happens
with the Juniper Mx-series coming into the market.  Perhaps there will
be some profit/pricing erosion in this space.  Instead of two
Cisco BU's fighting for customers, someone outside will give them
a run for their money.  (Not saying that Foundry, Force10, Extreme, etc..
aren't competitors, but folks that run BGP and such tend to be more
comfortable with the C+J combo).



-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.