Democratizing Capacity (or How to Interpret Cisco math)

Mid-December, Cisco held its Financial Analysts Conference. Shortly thereafter, I was fielding questions that summed up to “What is this all about? Cisco is cheaper than bare-metal? Really?”; check out slide 4 in this presentation.

Let me begin by clarifying that Cisco is not more affordable. Period. We’ll get to that analysis a bit later… the bigger point is that bare-metal networking is more than being affordable; it’s about giving customers degrees of freedom, transparency, and choice that they deserve in a mature industry.

In the dark ages of computing (aka 1983), a customer running IBM DB2 had to buy an IBM mainframe (complete with cables, disks, power distribution, memory, and IO) to go with the application. The compute industry has matured to a point where DB2 runs on hardware ranging from mainframes through p-series down into non-IBM x86 platforms hosted on operating systems including z/OS, Unix, Linux, and Windows. Application independent from OS independent from hardware; degrees of freedom and choice.

Circling back to networking, a significant number of products today, including Cisco’s Nexus 3000 and Nexus 9000 platforms, are based on industry prevalent networking silicon from companies like Broadcom. Optics and cables branded by networking incumbents are Continue reading