41–50 of 294 posts
> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS t…
> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.
Between whitebox and SDN. These companies won't be selling hardware for the 1-200% markup the have enjoyed all these years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS t…
> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.
> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Fac…
you have my sympathies
I live down the street from Cisco HQ. I share an apartment building with many of their engineers. Perhaps it is anecdotal, and my evidence comes purely from speaking with them (I have never seen their work), but they come across as absolutely terrible as software engineers. They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant. They have no care for the product, good pr…
> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
The manufacturers that have been actually making the hardware for the last 15 or more years, that's who. The only difference in many cases is the color and brand on the case.
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Why would hardware development not be important to security?
Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.
You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and S…
huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well.
if that is true, they were already x86 compatible...
with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the lack of trying though (if you know folks who have worked on ios, check with them, writing about it here, doesn't seem right)