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."

Comments

Cisco's in trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

Because XORP is more fun to say.

Linux & Decentralization redux

[duffbeer703]

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.

Re:Linux & Decentralization redux

[thpr]

Those switches are cost-effective because of the needlessly high cost of low-end equipment.

Like $1000 for a Cisco branch office router vs. $1000 for a PC with enough memory and processing power and networking cards to run XORP and match the router functionality?

Or perhaps under $30 per port for a fixed Ethernet layer 3 switch at 100Mb?

If you think these machines are "needlessly high cost" then I'm not sure you quite understand network requirements. I'm not saying there aren't places where XORP will be successful, but there are places it can't get to in the forseeable future (at least 3 technology generations). The core of any enterprise network is MUCH more complicated than a single switch and employs much more reliability than can be provided by a PC. Companies still buy IBM mainframes for a reason, and that high end in the routing space will be routers from Cisco, Juniper and similar devices for the forseeable future.

The SMB market? Bring on XORP, they'll be playing with it by the end of the decade.

Re:Linux & Decentralization redux

[Lumpy]

I dont think so.

we recently did something like there here. all remote offices had sonicwall firewalls. After discovering that the sonicwall hardware calls home constantly, the emailling of logs is worthless as it demands to send the email as if it was "from" the to address thus never making through most spam filters, and that the tech support sucks, hardware is crap, and the equipment is horribly overpriced for what it is we switched to all smoothwall firewalls running on low end mini-itx hardware in cheap cases.

each smoothwall firewall cost us $340.00 with ehcnosure and 2 gig hard drives installed for logging and data collection. we went from regular downtime whenever the link may have went down and required someone to reboot the sonicwall box to equipment that has worked perfectly for 1 year now.

the sonicwall equipment needed attention almost every day and we had to spend an extra $900.00 per box for added VPN access "drivers" and extra $500.00 for 25 more client connect licenses or it would start dropping DHCP leases and blocking static IP addresses inside the lan.

smoothwall guys talked us in to the commercial version for the support, but the free version would have done the job perfectly.

we saved lots of money, have a firewall /NAT router that is the best on the market hands down and allows me to collect more data on the networks QOS data and other items that no other commercial device can.

I can easily see XORP working on sub $400.00 hardware and working easily at gigabit speeds.

now show me a way to connect csu's into a regular pc that is not insanely priced... that is what CISCO has going for it. their routers have slots for the CSU's ready to go. XORP does not.

More about XORP

[the_mighty_$]

Here is more about XORP (the Extensible Open Router Platform), for those that don't know.

Cisco: Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, am hoping that XORP wipes the floor with Cisco.

Cisco is the only company with an employment policy that is worse than the one at Intel. Cisco does quarterly performance reviews; they are strictly by the bell (i.e. gaussian) curve. The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.

Worse, Cisco has also demanded that it be allowed to hire foreign engineers from India and China. According to Cisco management, it absolutely needs H-1B engineers in order to be competitive and has continued to hire H-1B engineers, never minding that 80,000 Americans were unemployed in Silicon Valley during the 2001-2003 recession.

I'm sure Cisco is just terrified. . .

[JSBiff]

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?)

Re:You are convoluted...

[duffbeer703]

...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.

customer support

[TheLibero]

one of the biggest reasons that cisco earn so much in comparison with other vendors is that they have decent support line. As for Open Source projects, usually, they are known by "fix-it-yourself".

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.

Re:Open source with Microsoft funding??

[mystik]

see xorp's website

It's BSD Licensed, so Yes, MS could take and use it, much like their TCP/IP stack.

Hmm...

[gtrubetskoy]

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.

they should be

[geg81]

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.