The new router gets the seal-pup treatment

Craig Matsumoto, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

March 5, 2008

2 Min Read
Clubbing Cisco's ASR

8:30 AM -- It should shock no one that competitors are heckling yesterday's ASR 1000 launch from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). (See Cisco Takes Hold of the Edge.)

A Redback Networks Inc. spokesman's response to an email query: "What good are fast processors if carriers believe your OS is unreliable? Cisco is a great company but they've been trying to push that boulder of doubt up a mountain for 10+ years."

(As has been pointed out, the IOS XE running on the ASR 1000 is based on the IOS available on Cisco 7200 routers.)

Redback also questions whether the ASR is really meant for the enterprise or the carrier market, and whether it's going to be the Cisco 7600 replacement or not. "We embrace their indecision. But for customers' sake, pick your puppy, and drown the rest."

Vyatta Inc. , the open-source router startup, let loose with both barrels, too. Let's peruse marketing VP Dave Roberts's blog entry, titled "You Spent 5 Years and $250M and That's All You Came Up With?"

  • "I talked to an analyst today who pointed out how many start ups you could have funded with that cash and how much technology you would have gotten back in return. Cisco should be hanging its head in shame."

  • "The routing table size is only 1 million IPv4 routes and 250,000 IPv6 routes. So that means that it's less scalable than the 7200 and if the world converts to IPv6 tomorrow it's obsolete immediately because the current Internet routing table is ~250,000 routes already. Fire the guy who did that math."

  • On running two operating-system images on one small box: "In fact, it has been done in boxes this small for quite a while (ahem, Vyatta), years in fact. In fact, Vyatta uses true virtualization, rather than just running an old operating system in a single process."

  • "They spent 5 years and $250M but could only come up with a 10 Gbps router?"

Roberts also has a field day with the carbon-footprint savings Cisco is touting. "Are price-per-port or maximum-performance now passé competitive metrics?" he asks. (That's not as amusing as his coffee-out-the-nose comment.)

Separately: There seems to have been some overreaction by investors regarding what the ASR implies for chip vendors. I'm hoping to get a story up about that later today.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Craig Matsumoto

Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

Yes, THAT Craig Matsumoto – who used to be at Light Reading from 2002 until 2013 and then went away and did other stuff and now HE'S BACK! As Editor-in-Chief. Go Craig!!

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