Great article. Just as much as JNPR wants to be an enterprise player, CSCO wants to be a player in the consumer market. Those are radical shifts in corporate strategy - they need a well-thought out and executable strategy, along the lines of IBM transforming itself into a services company.
In other news, in contrast to what CSCO expected, shares of JNPR and ALU go up today while CSCO drops. This is of course short-term thinking from the market, but telling in that the market also went ho-hum.
Remember its cisco math... so the CRS-1 actually has 16 line-cards slots, so it actually can handle 2.24Tb/s of real bandwidth or 4.48Tb/s in cisco math.
Also, when using 100GigE ports, you waste 40 Gig/slot of bandwitdh..
But yes.. cisco's announcement is way too much hype
re: Cisco Boosts the Core With CRS-3Yes, agree on Hype, however, no one commented on two areas, how does two areas compares with Juniper and ALU as feature of router. First, the NPS (This seems to help cloud computing) and Power (3 x capacity on line card from existing system with same power). Other I agree that Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent already claimed such as 100G interface. Who would like to implement 72 chassis, which could be system management and cabling nightmare!
Cisco stock did drop, but it had run up 10% in the two days before the announcement. So in that sense, i guess it worked.
Cisco certainly wants to be a consumer play, and that's going to be a radical shift, as you've said. I think Cisco also wants to become synonymous with The Internet, in consumers' minds. It's like Sun's old catchphrase about being "the dot in dot-com" (which I hated).
FEC is usually added (and removed) by the optical module or the framer and is never counted as part of the payload capacity which is the one seen by the NP/ASIC. If you would use 14x10 ports, then the actual BW on the fiber with FEC will be more than 140G, but if you're using the 100G card, then 40G of processing power and "sellable" BW is wasted per slot.
Even I got ahead of myself. I thought the board capacity was 140Gbps. Turns out only the slot is capable of 140Gbps. The actual card can only do 100Gbps. So our collective brain is only going to hurt when they come up with the 140Gbps card upgrade. Sigh!
Can you find out what mix of traffic they used to measure that whopping throughput? Whenever the vendor doesn't mention 64B packets or iMix, then they are usually maxing the packet size - 1500 or 9K.
-desi
PS. FWIW, Cramer is bullish on cisco. A big Booyah from Tasman Dr.! :)
Steve,
Great article. Just as much as JNPR wants to be an enterprise player, CSCO wants to be a player in the consumer market. Those are radical shifts in corporate strategy - they need a well-thought out and executable strategy, along the lines of IBM transforming itself into a services company.
In other news, in contrast to what CSCO expected, shares of JNPR and ALU go up today while CSCO drops. This is of course short-term thinking from the market, but telling in that the market also went ho-hum.
-desi