re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'I read this as a positive for Force10. It shows that Cisco, Extreme and Foundry all see the opportunity in 10G and are compelled to pre-announce products. Anyone who doesn't see this is kidding himself and anyone who believes these guys have product is naive. Furthermore, anyone who wants to build from the core of their enterprise with an eye on long term investment, on a re-packaged 65K "may not get fired, but won't get promoted either."
Cisco doesn't have a competitive product for the high end and their announcement proved it. And Mucho Grande is nowhere near being ready. By the time they finish their first trial and ship their first mucho grande for revenue, Force10 will be a $100m company and I/T guy who bet on a product that's twice as large as the E1200 with half the services and much lower GigE density (where all the action is right now--no one needs 30 ports of 10GigE), will look like a dumb ass.
Finishing the chassis is the first step. It will be some time before Foundry has something they can actually ship for revenues.
I bought some of their stock a couple of weeks ago, so I'm betting on them to make a play in 10G. They have to do something before their load balancers run out of gas in the market and Dell/Extreme consumate their deal. I bet Bobby Johnson has something up his sleeve, it's just not mucho grande. I think MG is a red herring for something else they're planning, like an acquisition of a WiFi company for example.
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'WC-astute post, I would like to see Foundry follow your advice on an acquisition, doubtful though.
Having worked there for 4 years I have a great deal of respect for Bobby Johnson. Keep in mind he did not get a degree marketing but is magna cum laude in engineering. In the past Foundry has really not developed any significant partnerships, no reason to think anything will change.
The Mucho Grande is their future, it is not a product, it will develop as the chassis based BigIron did with the fastiron and netiron etc.
Interested to hear on people's response at InterOP this week and their perception of what Foundry was showing
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'First, Cisco announced 720Gb/s switch fabric capacity for the new Cat6500 upgrades, even though they admit they can only support 16 10GigE ports at wire-speed.
Not to be outdone, Foundry announces 1.2Tb/s switch fabric capacity, but according to their own marketing material, they might be able to support a maximum of 32 10GigE ports at wire-speed. No mention of whether this requires some local switching on the line card.
Please stop the insanity. Intelligent trade publications like LightReading should be able to force vendors to disclose their capacity numbers using a reliable metric, like full-mesh test performance results.
Dounble counting the fabric bandwidth used ot be a pretty common trick. Now, some vendors are already moving toward a "quardruple counting" metric. If we don't stop this right now, soon, we will see switching fabric capacity quotes in the tens of terabits range as marketing department finds new creative ways of counting bits multiple times to look better in competitive charts.
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande' Sorry for my ignorance, but why does the Cat6k with the new linecards and supervisor 720 not considered as a "real" product ?
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'Go buy some Cisco 6500s. No real redundancy unless you pay an arm and a leg and still its is a blocking architecture. But since you talk like you work for cisco (make no sense and only negative sell) you probably still believe in the Cat 5000 which you cisco guys sold 5 years past the point it was obsolete.
At least with foundry you get straight answers and the only true migration strategy in the industry that is cost effective with no degradation of performance.
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'hooooweeee! sumbitch shore did drop a my-t stinky 'un on all dem poor anal-lysts and make-my-stock-go-broker with this ole lead wait. and just what the sam-hell difference is there bewtixt that MG8 and MG40? looks the same, smells the same, runs the same software, uses the same hardware...when we come accross sum-tin down here in the south that looks an smells like horse sh*t, we shore as snot don't eat it cuz we know its sh*t thru-n-thru. still no redundency. what service provider worth his salt is gonna stick one of these here inta his network. wha happ'ns when the switch fabric fails? wha happ'ns when the management module fails? how long it take dat system to reboot and make the network all stable like? i jest don't by it. nope, i jest don't by it at tall.
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'100% agree - this is out-of-control marketing and makes the whole industry look bad. Homey don't play that.
When's the last time you talked to a customer when you *didn't* have to say "this is Cisco math" or "this isn't Cisco math"? It takes two minutes per meeting to explain that I'm not double-counting or, God forbid, quadruple-counting the numbers. If I had a dollar for each of those two minutes, I could retire now.
Sheesh ...
- fabric_man
--------------- Please stop the insanity. Intelligent trade publications like LightReading should be able to force vendors to disclose their capacity numbers using a reliable metric, like full-mesh test performance results.
re: Foundry Unwraps 'Mucho Grande'Lipo'd, ah'll make dis reel easy like, so's that even youse can understand it
much-ass grassy ass is a box, git it, a box an not a technology dat has no gigabit ethernet modules un no switch fabric redundancy un no hitless management module failover un no shippin product till q3 er so
ah kin tell you what peepole will think but it ain't gonna be kind
-Stu