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BusinessWeek On XORP vs. Cisco
cornfed writes "BusinessWeek is running this article talking about how XORP will take on Cisco's dominance in the router market. The article speculates that XORP could represent the next 'open-source rebellion.' One can only imagine the fallout within the telecommunications industry if an open-source project like this gained traction-- Cisco would not be the only giant to be slain."
The result of XORP & similar technology will be a decentralization of networks. If you look at a typical enterprise network, the backbone of that network will be a single "enterprise" (ie. expensive) Layer-3 switch from a company like Extreme, Foundry, Cisco or whatever.
Those switches are cost-effective because of the needlessly high cost of low-end equipment.
If supported, flexible & cheap routing becomes a reality, you'll see clouds of cheap-commodity level hardware replace big networking iron... just as Linux displaced Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Go after the big guy first and the others will be afraid to fight. That worked so well in gradeschool
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware. Because, you know, I'm sure that businesses of all sizes are *very* anxious to rely on general purpose PC's for their high-performance routing needs.
Don't get me wrong, I think XORP could be usefull in certain applications. I'm currently running Linux on an old Pentium for sharing internet access on my home network, so I understand that for small networks with relatively slow internet connections, general purpose hardware, running routing software, can be usefull.
But I doubt it's going to 'slay the giant'. So much hyperbole in tech journalism these days (oh well, how else are you going to get people to read the article?)
...Timewarp 1997...
You're absolutely correct! What major reasearch lab would ditch their multi-million dollar SGI Origin supercomputing clusters for low cost Lintel hardware?
I can stake my entire enterprise on proven software that costs $15,000+ for a workstation and $300,000+ for a server, or Linux... being a systems programmer for a large company I can say it will never happen.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Production networks can't tolerate down time, or waiting for few admins to hack some code and fix some buggy router. So that XORP might be open source, but it has to be commercialized as well.
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
It's not surprising that a Berkeley CS researcher thinks his open source project can "slay Cisco", though Ghosh never says anything like that in the article. It might not even be surprising when a Business Week reporter says something so naive, but it is disappointing. Even Linux isn't slaying anyone - it's apple and oranges (or maybe apples and ciscos): XORP might be comparable to Cisco's IOS router operating system, but XORP is hardly comparable to Cisco itself. If XORP works out, and becomes an effective competitor with IOS at any level, Cisco and its actual competitors will just start selling it, bundled with the support, marketing and corporate accountability that people buy when they buy "Cisco". Now if only the BizWeek reporter, Alex Salkever, had realized the compelling story here is Microsoft's funding a million-dollar routing project, and releasing the source as its central development strategy. That would make the Slashdot front page, too, without making Salkever famous for spreading Fearless Certainty, Undoubtedly (FC-U, (TM)).
--
make install -not war
You mean the stuff they got when they bought Linksys? That hardware is completely irrelevant to this discussion, because XORP is intended to replace the high-end cisco equipment, and the stuff they bought from linksys didn't even compete with their own products, with one or two limited exceptions like cisco's DOCSIS cable modem. I don't even know if the linksys cable modem runs linux.
It does seem highly likely that we will see commoditization of the router market. It makes more sense to provide a chassis that takes full-length PCI cards than to require special cards which use a PCI interface anyway. PCI-E is the logical choice since it provides (potentially) more bandwidth than even PCI-X and you could use a wonky form factor if you wanted to, for example blade-type cards that have their connector on the back instead of the bottom. Even using an ordinary rackmount PC form factor, with just 66MHz/64 bit PCI, you could equal or surpass the performance of a cisco router with COTS hardware, provided you had the right software to run it all. Using 64 bit processors over the 32 bit ones found in most networking gear means being able to process IPv6 addresses significantly faster, and most of those systems do not have much processing power because they are proprietary and it's expensive to implement. PC processors are cheap and reference designs are readily available. However, we will need new chipset designs to provide sufficient bus bandwidth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes this is horrible because all 80,000 of these Americans deeply wanted to work for Cisco and oddly enough all 80,000 of them were perfectly qualified to do so... Also what the parent forgot to mention is that all 80,000 of them had all available Cisco certs.. holy crap cisco boned america on this one...
Get a clue I'm tired of fools using stats like this to claim companies dont need H-1B engineers... You simply dont have any idea how complex the workforce actually is, why dont you come back to the real world, being in touch with reality results in making yourself look like less of an ass..
FTA: "I don't see open-source routing replacing high-end routers in enterprise or service provider networks," said Dave Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group. "But in the real low end, like in the D-Link and Linksys category of product, free software could be very useful."
Useful, yes. But to how many? I'm not sure that Joe Sixpack could configure a router through a command line. In order to compete with Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link, they will also have to include a real stateful firewall and DynDNS support (which is something that is being included in most retail firewalls now).
Also, if you have to setup a dedicated PC to run this, your average small business or home user isn't going to be interested when they can go to the local superstore and pickup a $59 Linksys that's ready to go, quiet, and small. Unfortunately, this software will not make it to the point where it would be a threat to any appliance-based router builder.
I too work for a Fortune 500 corporation and I can say with complete certainity that it would take at least 10+ years of proven success by Xorp before we would even consider using it out on the edge of our network, let alone the core. Cisco's IOS is cheap compared to its hardware, and I doubt that Xorp is going to build the chassis and cards to power their OSS routing platform. Plus, are they going to give me 356x24x4 hardware and software support almost anywhere on the face of the planet? I think not.
Routers used by large companies are very specialized pieces of equipmnet (Cisco 7200, 7500, 12000GSR, etc.) and can not be replicated using cheap off the shelf parts. I doubt that Cisco or Juniper is going to let you replace their bootloaders and operating systems and still provide you with a service contract. And service contracts are the life blood for Enterprise networking customers. Unless Cisco or Juniper come out and embrace Xorp like IBM did Linux, then Xorp will not find any Enterprise customers for their router software.
Of those 80,000 Americans I'd bet a good number of them cared less where they'd work after endless months of unemployment and cared more about having a job in the field, period. As for Cisco certs.. which makes more sense: bringing an Engineer in from overseas or training one that's already living here?
I think both of you raise some valid points but I think the truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle.
XORP has a great idea, but they are several years late to the party. Apparently, NSF, Intel and its other backers have failed to learn from the dot-bomb era: you can't build a successful business on the backs of a product you're giving away at no charge. Do they plan to make it up on volume? :-)
Linux enthusiasts ought to look toward more commercial companies, such as ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com/) who has been in business 10 years, and building Linux routers for 7. Their corporate profile says they have 30K units in the field.
MontaVista (http://www.montavista.com/) has an embedded OS for PPC and ARM that would provide something more extensible and functional than XORP.
Heck, even Technologic Systems (http://www.embeddedarm.com/) has more mature, embedded products than XORP.
XORP is a great idea--but you're better off going with companies that have already proven themselves in the market and have mature products.
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device that would provide me with 16 GE interface per blade, a crypto accelerator, an optional firewall module and whatever else cisco has up their sleeve for the 6500 series? IOS isn't what you pay for when you buy a router, Cisco is a hardware company.
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware.
Yes, and SGI probably never thought that PC hardware would drive them out of business either.
Also, only a small core needs to be high performance; hardware vendors can take this kind of open platform, add a small piece of specialized hardware and custom software, and save themselves a boatload of development effort, and their customers a lot of training costs.
- hardware
- that is reliable
- hot-pluggable
- redundant (spare powersupplies, etc)
- and routing software (that's where XORP fits), and
- warranty
- support
- documentation and support materials
- training
- certification / qualifications
- network design / professional services consultancy
- brand recognition
- big reference sites, and a proven track record
- marketing assistance (powered by... kind of stuff)
- accountability
Some of these areas are a real opportunity for third parties, once XORP gets to be a solid product, but the image, brand, reputation, etc will be hard to overcome in the short to medium term. In the longer term, the Linux model shows it is possible (though it's hardly inevitable - it's not the only open router free cisco type project, after all).Still, the marketing side matters less in a tech-savvy small/medium enterprise, or in a consultancy operation. It might get a start there, or in a more cost-sensitive environment.
And open source can even be argued to confer security advantages. It could get interesting...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Now admittedly, if they didn't get -any- competent applicants, it might be acceptable to hire an H1B here or there, but those are, by far, the exception rather than the rule, and should be limited to senior engineering positions and only in very small companies. Larger companies, upon failing to find someone qualified for a senior position, should be able to promote someone from within to a senior position and hire someone into a junior position---someone who doesn't require an H1B. There are plenty of new college graduates in the valley looking for work.
Sorry, but there are far too many tech employees unemployed in the valley for your argument to hold weight. Companies in the valley should be utterly fined into oblivion if they are hiring H1B engineers right now in any significant quantity. As to whether Cisco is or not, I have no idea.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They support their stuff. On more than on occasion, I've seen them come out with a fix a real problem, after you tell them about it. They actually provide a service of substance to their customers. Try calling Msoft and complaining about explorer bugs.
We could go back and forth all day without convincing eachother but personally I think we shouldn't limit the number of foreign workers and immigrants and we should make naturalization much much easier. (I was born in America by the way before I get accused of anything) Getting Americans hired over foreigners starts in schools, if we want Americans to be hired lets at least make there education and oppurtunities better to give them an advantage instead of this artificial advantage of limiting immigrants which does nothing but make it harder for companies to find acceptable candidates.
Lets face it, the reason why Americans are unemployed isnt because companies are hiring more foreigners. Its because Americans are becoming less marketable to said companies. Why is that, a number of reasons but mainly the piss poor quality of our education system.
The point being we really don't use routers anymore. We use switches because they can keep pace with the price performance we need to maintain. Routers work ok but up to a point, then the economics and complexity of managing ever increasing bandwidth, endpoints and whatnot makes routers, even free routers not cost effective.
Remember people YOU are the most expensive element, not the machine. YOU are.
> can't quit
Of course they can quit. They're also given a long time to find another employer in this country.
> don't make alot of money.
You don't have *any* experience with H1B visa holders do you? By law, they are required to make more than their counterparts! Saying they don't make a lot is a lie. INS makes sure they make more than the local talent. Cheaper labor is not a valid reason for INS to allow a company to hire an H1B. Also, if someone is available locally for the same money or less, you are required to hire them rather than an H1B. In other words, H1B visa holders make more money than their coworkers. You need to run that crap by a lawyer if you're ever thinking about looking into hiring one. They'll set you straight very quickly.
> import a cheap
Huh? Every actually dealt with hiring someone with an H1B visa? I've done it almost 50 times so far, and it usually costs about $5k worth of legal fees and a lot of time to hire someone and get them the H1B visa. That isn't cheap. Also, you're required to pay them more money by law, so again, you're nuts if you say that's cheap.
> exploitable workforce
Again, huh? When you add-in the high legal cost of getting the H1B done plus the usual high cost of finding and training new employees, you certainly won't exploit them. If they quit, you've lost a ton of money and time. The high upfront cost of hiring an H1B visa holder almost guarantees that companies are more careful with them than a local citizen. For example, my company gives H1B visa holders almost twice as much per year in their personal budget for training versus a US citizen because we want to keep them.
Again, do you have any experience at all with H1B visa holders? It doesn't sound like it.