Amazon Plans To Challenge Cisco in Networking Market With Much Cheaper Switches, Report Says (theinformation.com)

Amazon Web Services already dominates the market for cloud services. Now, reports The Information, it is eyeing a part of the cloud business it doesn't already control: the $14 billion global market for data center switches [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: AWS is considering selling its own networking switches for business customers -- hardware devices that move traffic around networks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cloud unit's plans and another person who has been briefed on the project. The plan could plunge Amazon more deeply into the lucrative enterprise computing market, posing a direct challenge to incumbents in the business like Cisco, along with Arista Networks and Juniper Networks.

As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.

Comments

Re:Cisco in the death spiral

[servo335]

Cisco is just power of a name soon a new name will step up and challenge

More then the equiptment.

[jellomizer]

We are able to get switches and routers for cheap for a while. Many have the same features that Cisco offers.
The reason most companies stick with Cisco, is because they are able to find Certified Staff to work on their products.

If a company tried to upgrade to Amazon Fire Sale Switches, then you need to find staff willing to maintain them and do it properly with best practices in mind, may be difficult. You can probably get Cisco Certified staff to work on them, however if there are any differences there may be an issue.

Re:More then the equiptment.

[swb]

I can't help but think that "Cisco certified" is a giant circle jerk of empire building, premium brand affiliation and so-called network experts hiding behind their Cisco manuals telling everyone how complex switching is.

It used to be that Cisco and networking were synonymous, but not for a long time. There's too much competitive product and often a lot cheaper but a lot of orgs keep buying into the Cisco myth,

Re:More then the equiptment.

[swb]

99% of the networking out there doesn't get more complicated than VLANs, QoS and spanning tree with maybe some pretty trivial static routing on top of it. You might find a little bit of OSPF routing here and there, either bigger physical campuses or multi-site environments trying to deal with automating failover between MPLS circuits and IPSec backups.

You need a CCIE for that like you need a PhD in chemistry to cook dinner.

That's not to say that CCIE isn't one of the best vendor certifications and CCIEs aren't smarter than the average bear, but it's also a pretty narrow space where it's an applicable requirement outside of larger telcos, data centers and carriers, and maybe places bought into very broad Cisco-specific product suites.

My point is mostly that the Cisco crowd likes to make "muh networking skillz" into some kind of mystical knowledge when it really isn't. It mostly seems like they hide behind a greatly elevated sense of phony expertise, which Cisco and their resellers are only all too happy to reinforce.

Silly

[heson]

We pay top dollars (maybe 4x any other brand total cost, the license is ridiculously expensive) for Cisco because they are proven to work and don't fail. We have tried lot of almost as expensive brands and they failed, the chance of us trying something new is 0% testing in a lab another proven brand that is not burned is possible.

I.e to get into market, start with solid cheap stuff (where the requirements are low). Then try to fight the big players.

My estimated outcome: either they do not survive one year or they become as expensive as Cisco if they win.

Re:Silly

[The-Ixian]

Especially with upstarts like Ubiquiti Networks entering with ridiculously inexpensive hardware good features and easy to use management software.

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon just buys them as their entry into the market.

Not a difficult task

[nehumanuscrede]

It won't take a whole lot to undercut Cisco since they have always had ridiculous pricing.
Even companies with damn near infinite amounts of cash finally started looking at other vendors because of ludicrous price levels.

However !

That said, I have decommissioned Cisco routers and switches that have been running ( without a reboot ) for twenty plus YEARS without a hiccup.
I doubt you're going to find that sort of reliability in anything offered at rock bottom prices.

So, while expensive as hell, I can't complain about the operational track record.

Re:Hardware? We don't need no stinkin hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes this can be done with a regular computer but it will not perform at near the same level as a real managed switch that is using ASICs to do all the work which are purpose built to do exactly that. They will outperform a CPU doing the work every-time. You can throw a ton of CPU at a PFSense box and achieve good performance but then you might as well bought a real firewall which will be easier to manage and perform even better.

I say that as someone that threw together two old servers to make a PFSense HA cluster until we could afford actual firewalls which more than doubled our performance overnight. It's easy to look at a NIC and think that its 10gig so put two together and you'll get 10gig switching throughput. You'll be lucky to get 5 out of it.