Just because ICANN is a power-grabbing organization with very little connection to the Internet community doesn't mean this report is off-base. Operators genuinely dislike Sitefinder for a number of both technical and political reasons. Sitefinder is bad, stop pretending like it isn't.
Okay, so I do network engineering for a living. I've been doing it for about eight years, so I think I have some insight for you. First off, ebrandsberg's +5 moderated statement (#9567080) is a little bogus.
While the math on the hardware is straight, he fails to comprehend that the routing engines of Linux and FreeBSD are completely not designed for rapid routing and forwarding lookups. While there is some progress being made in this area, it is incredibly slow work. The Linux and FreeBSD IP stacks are not designed for packet forwarding and rapid cut-through switching; they're designed for dealing with an entirely separate problem, and the code is pretty ugly compared to the rest of the large body of network code. BSD has a leg up on Linux, but 2.6 is catching up fast in this regard.
I don't understand what you think you're not getting from Cisco. From an innovation perspective, Cisco has pretty much every feature in real-world networks deployed that people need, with some minor exceptions in the MPLS world. While Juniper beats them on lookup and engine performance, the Juniper backplane has some distance to go when coupled with large amounts of traffic. Your own description of your problem isn't sufficient data for me to really speak to your requirements, but I have to go on record here and say I think your statement about Cisco not able to provide unique, customized needs is a little off-kilter. I question what your unique and customized needs really are, because the reality of network engineering is you find a set of features, you find a box that meets your performance requirements, and you roll out. Cisco has a feature/performance mix for every network from A to FF, including yours.
If your sales team isn't working well, then find a different one. This is standard business practice, and not unique to Cisco.
Please do not take the advice of other trolls in this thread who suggest that they can recommend you a vendor without knowing intimate details of your application. They are snakeoil salesmen. People who suggest Juniper, Extreme, Riverstone, may all have good recommendations, and they may be sound for your application, but I wouldn't make that judgement call without being absolutely certain that they knew all your requirements. For example, I do over 5Gb/s outbound to the Internet on Foundry Networks gear, and while it works, I can't honestly say that i'm happy with it for the features that I need. We gave Juniper a shot and they didn't have the right cost-per-port/density that we needed, so we ended up heading in Cisco's direction. This decision took me about a month and a half in comparing all the options, and doing a feature matrix that was weighted towards what I needed.
This may all seem like stupidity or busywork to you, but I assure you it is not. Any network design requires this much attention, and your company will thank you for it. Do not try to do things cheaply - the PC router road is a worn one, mostly because people come back down the same path they took to get there and go off in another direction.
If you are insistent on using "open-source" using Zebra, GateD, or Click under FreeBSD, Linux, or something else, I would advise you to wait for some time unless your traffic needs are under a couple of megs a second.
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Just because ICANN is a power-grabbing organization with very little connection to the Internet community doesn't mean this report is off-base. Operators genuinely dislike Sitefinder for a number of both technical and political reasons. Sitefinder is bad, stop pretending like it isn't.
Okay, so I do network engineering for a living. I've been doing it for about eight years, so I think I have some insight for you. First off, ebrandsberg's +5 moderated statement (#9567080) is a little bogus.
While the math on the hardware is straight, he fails to comprehend that the routing engines of Linux and FreeBSD are completely not designed for rapid routing and forwarding lookups. While there is some progress being made in this area, it is incredibly slow work. The Linux and FreeBSD IP stacks are not designed for packet forwarding and rapid cut-through switching; they're designed for dealing with an entirely separate problem, and the code is pretty ugly compared to the rest of the large body of network code. BSD has a leg up on Linux, but 2.6 is catching up fast in this regard.
I don't understand what you think you're not getting from Cisco. From an innovation perspective, Cisco has pretty much every feature in real-world networks deployed that people need, with some minor exceptions in the MPLS world. While Juniper beats them on lookup and engine performance, the Juniper backplane has some distance to go when coupled with large amounts of traffic. Your own description of your problem isn't sufficient data for me to really speak to your requirements, but I have to go on record here and say I think your statement about Cisco not able to provide unique, customized needs is a little off-kilter. I question what your unique and customized needs really are, because the reality of network engineering is you find a set of features, you find a box that meets your performance requirements, and you roll out. Cisco has a feature/performance mix for every network from A to FF, including yours.
If your sales team isn't working well, then find a different one. This is standard business practice, and not unique to Cisco.
Please do not take the advice of other trolls in this thread who suggest that they can recommend you a vendor without knowing intimate details of your application. They are snakeoil salesmen. People who suggest Juniper, Extreme, Riverstone, may all have good recommendations, and they may be sound for your application, but I wouldn't make that judgement call without being absolutely certain that they knew all your requirements. For example, I do over 5Gb/s outbound to the Internet on Foundry Networks gear, and while it works, I can't honestly say that i'm happy with it for the features that I need. We gave Juniper a shot and they didn't have the right cost-per-port/density that we needed, so we ended up heading in Cisco's direction. This decision took me about a month and a half in comparing all the options, and doing a feature matrix that was weighted towards what I needed.
This may all seem like stupidity or busywork to you, but I assure you it is not. Any network design requires this much attention, and your company will thank you for it. Do not try to do things cheaply - the PC router road is a worn one, mostly because people come back down the same path they took to get there and go off in another direction.
If you are insistent on using "open-source" using Zebra, GateD, or Click under FreeBSD, Linux, or something else, I would advise you to wait for some time unless your traffic needs are under a couple of megs a second.