[c-nsp] Understanding 10G line card oversubscription

[Phil Mayers]

On 03/22/2011 08:23 PM, Tony Varriale wrote:
>
>> I've heard "very shortly" from Cisco before. Frankly, they've got no
>> belief credits with me. Unless and until I see it, it's vapour.
>
> We all have. If you are considering the platform and need those
> features, get a hold of your partner and/or Cisco account team.
> Unfortunately I can't share those details/timelines.

Why would I bother listening to details/timelines from them? They've 
been wildly, wildly inaccurate in the past.

At this point, Cisco could tell me "it's out next week" and I wouldn't 
base purchasing decisions on it ;o)

> Considering it's a 3 year old platform, you are asking for a lot IMO.
> The n7k wasn't really meant for what's it's doing and going to do. Oh,
> the 6500 platform is 11 years old this year. But, there are other
> platforms that meet your requirements.

Sure. Other vendors, too...

>>
>> Which is a shame, because a lot of the Nexus features look great;
>> NX-OS certainly seems to have a better, newer structure and both the
>> control and forwarding plane are a lot faster on the N7k.

> I'm not sure I get the shame part. Which part is a shame?

The N7k is a nice platform in many ways. Far higher performance, better 
software and some interesting features like mcLAG. It would be a great 
fit for us, *if* it had the MPLS feature set. It doesn't == a shame (for us)

>>
>> I would love to be proven wrong. Maybe NX-OS is built in such a way as
>> to permit speedy feature development. But unless and until it's
>> shipping, and the bugs are ironed out...
> Any software development cycle is going to be that. As stated above,
> Nexus wasn't really expecting to support service modules, MPLS other
> whiz bang features initially. But, it will. So, I think they are doing a
> fairly good job considering.

What do you expect me to do? Give them a round of applause? They do get 
*paid* to do this after all. And let's face it - "fairly good job" is 
not exactly a ringing endorsement. Congratulations! You're not doing badly!

;o)

At the end of the day, I'm sure the nexus range will sell fine without 
weirdo edge-case UK universities as a customer. But for me, it's a shame 
that, where the 6500 was a swiss army knife, the new platforms seem to 
be less so. It worked well for us, giving us great performance at 
relatively low cost and ease of sparing, testing and deployment.

Others I'm sure disagree and that's fine - but I can only speak for myself.