[c-nsp] Leaked Video or Not (Linux and Cisco for internal Sales folks)

[Saku Ytti]

Hey Gert,

> (Yes, we have templates for both pre-ELS and post-ELS, but having to
> figure out what is new now and how and why port-unrelated things have
> to be changed was an unneccessary waste of lifetime)

Not disagreeing, but on the scale of approving new hardware, writing
new templates isn't that significant OPEX cost. New platform means
learning new limitations of HW, new corner cases, new way to
troubleshoot, new things to monitor, it's inevitably rather huge
chore. Maybe there comes a day when we don't have to be hyper-aware of
the underlaying hardware in networking kit, but that certainly isn't
today, in that future, this would have been relatively much larger
issue.
Perhaps this is more marketing problem than technical, as they are
presenting it as minor upgrade, when in reality everything changed.

It would be still interesting to hear what was the reason. Would the
preELS map poorly to modern switching asics, is postELS more in-line
on how forwarding-plane is actually programmed? Or could they have
trivially supported preELS, but regardless of BRCM noticed their first
attempt at switch CLI has inefficiencies they decided to remedy while
changing everything anyhow.

-- 
  ++ytti