re: Force10: Where's the Exit?Hate to interrupt your semantics about nationalistic pride. The main point here is that F10 has no differentiators and not total solution while flagshipping an architecture that is ultra high latency and the worst jitter I've tested in the last 6 years. They do have a tripple play, but they are the ones at bat. Your out.
re: Force10: Where's the Exit?Did I miss something? No one on this message group said anything about Phoenix. Lots of ragging on SV, but nothing on Phoenix. You've got to stop smoking that desert weed.
re: Force10: Where's the Exit?Ciena has laid off 80 people in its Ottawa location. This is 1/3 of the previous staffing level of 240. The R&D work done by these employees is going to be off shored and sent to partners.
The DSL business must not be as good a people thought it was.
re: Force10: Where's the Exit?>...have you also tested Foundry's flow setup rate?
Yes, I have. They have a technology called Foundry Direct Routing that is the same logic that Cisco and Juniper pre-program the hardware. This is available in all of their newest product over the last year (Super-X, IMR, FastIrone Edge-X, and I'm assuming BI RX which I have not tested yet). Foundry no longer takes first packet to CPU to set up flows, but sets pre-programmed forwarding entries per routing table. L2 is a different story as you must setup the flows that way to learn MAC adddresses, but all the good L2 vendors have hardware forwarding of unknown unicasts if you don't want to see this either.
>F10 in contrast is forwarding stateless. Therefore they've got >slightly higher delay and jitter.
Not talking about higher jitter only, it is also the fact that the jitter varies from packet to packet. I don't think any two packets have the same arrival rate! This is the only vendor I've seen with this jitter anomaly. Their latency is not slightly higher than Cisco/Foundry, but actually a multiple.
I don't see anything that Force10 does better than Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, or even Extreme. Especially now that they can't even claim to be density leaders. Now add the fact that they don't even appreciate their own employees and ship their jobs off so they can get cheaper R&D to try to catch up to the other vendors now kicking their butts. Reminds me of the story about an old bull and a young bull.
re: Force10: Where's the Exit?Heard, something big could be happening in F10, in June/July. Not sure whether it is another HUGE LAYOFF or CLOSING or SELLING the company. Definitely not an IPO.
They are fast running out of money. Either they have to raise money or close the shop.
But I'm still an unripe banana :(