[c-nsp] Understanding 10G line card oversubscription

[Phil Mayers]

On 03/22/2011 12:50 AM, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> On 21/03/2011 22:22, Phil Mayers wrote:
>> Having said that, the truly tragic thing about the 6500 is that, until
>> recently, it still beat a lot of newer platforms on feature mix combined
>> with decent performance and reasonable (if not great) density.
> [...]
>> Having said that, I won't be sorry to see the back of the crappy CPU and
>> 12.2S IOS train ;o)
>
> that works both ways. Because the switch has been around for many years
> and has been such a cash-cow for Cisco, it's been financially possible
> for cisco to fund development of a very large number of features on the
> system. If you start out from scratch with a new pile of silicon (asr9k
> / n7k or indeed any other product line), you end up spending huge
> quantities of money even to get close to feature parity to existing
> products, by which time your hardware is outdated. It's a really
> difficult problem to deal with.

Especially so if you insist on letting bits of your company compete 
against each other with subtly different platforms ;o)

I had a long reply here, but basically: Cisco made their choice. They 
chose to go "clean slate" and discard their own experience. I'm sure 
they'll work their way back up the learning curve. When we come to 
re-procure, we'll see how they do - it's always an interesting experience.