re: Juniper: The Other Cola?Can you still buy the Bay ARN/ASN? Way back when I did like them quite a bit. They were quite stable at that time. And Cisco was just another CPE vendor.
re: Juniper: The Other Cola?The ARN is slow, stone-aged junk; the 2430 doesn't look much better and there are no performance numbers on Nortel's site to make it look better (other than "high performance" because of its 16MB of RAM and 50MHz processor); and the Contivity is meant as a VPN switch.
re: Juniper: The Other Cola?You can order so many different options for an ARN its hard to put a firm price on it but its competetive with the 2600, and a better box anyday. Plus they have that great Site Manager GUI instead of being stuck with IOS, of course you can use CLI too if you're a masochist. They halved the price for all BayRS boxes back around 1999, but that also killed the revenue stream internally at Nortel so the whole line kind of got sidelined development wise. I've got customers who still order them by the dozens all the time for point of sale, F/R with ISDN dial-back into hub spoke with BCN/BLN at the core. Very stable as you said and BayRS has continued to release. They are up to ver 15.6 last I looked. I believe ASN is also still available but not pushed as much. The thing that really killed the line was when the Motorola 68000 series CPUs topped out at the 68060. The move to the power PC line forced a code respin and NT was not willing to invest in the line but all of the models are still quite viable.
What no one mentions is that the Cisco boxes have been frozen in time for about the same number of years and use the same Motorola CPUs. Performance in an branch office CPE router is not a challenge, it just has to crank away for years and years and the code has to be stable. BayRS is still viable, stable, and maintained. End of story!
re: Juniper: The Other Cola?"Plus they have that great Site Manager GUI instead of being stuck with IOS"
Wow! Its another case of salesguy amnesia!
The historians among us (i.e. with more than 10 years of data experience) haven't so quickly forgot that SiteMangler was wellfleets undoing, and they couldn't sell their products to carriers until they broke down and created the "technician interface"... by then it was too late, IOS took over, and routers that run CLI have ruled the world since.
Its too bad, since they had the "VIP" idea first, did ospf better, etc, but I'm not going to overlook a crap EMS because of my romanticism about "what could have been". I don't think anyone else is either. If I were prone to do that, I would probably have a mac on my desk as well...
re: Juniper: The Other Cola?"What no one mentions is that the Cisco boxes have been frozen in time for about the same number of years and use the same Motorola CPUs."
Which boxes? Cisco 2600? Well, at least the more recent models, such as 2691, employ a RISC CPU. Also some of the NM modules have own processors, thus taking load from the central CPU.
Wellfleet had nice boxes a few years ago but today they cannot compete with Cisco's low-end or mid-range routers anymore.
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