Core router bakeoff?

Robert Sanders rsanders at mindspring.net
Thu May 7 22:12:43 UTC 1998


>You don't want Bay 

As somebody who has a few Bay B[CL]Ns in his network along with the
requisite army of Ciscos, I regretfully must concur.  They had an
architectural lead over Cisco until VIP2-40/50s, (d)CEF and the 12000, but
they haven't been keeping up.  Cisco has Bay outmatched in scalability,
density, software stability, breadth of product line, modern features (CAR,
policy routing, WRED, etc.), support, documentation, ease of configuration
-- there are still some things you can't reasonably configure on a Bay
without Site Mangler pumping SNMP into it, and unfortunately sometimes a
router in a bad spot isn't easy to access via anything but its console,
visibility (our net management guys seem to have a harder time dealing with
Bay), and overall sleep-cycle impact.  Heck, Cisco routers even look
better.  Nowadays there's not much reason to consider Bay other than cost,
and over the long run, I believe the Bay TCO is higher.

And it's a heck of a lot easier to hire somebody with relevant Cisco
experience than with Bay or 3com.  Don't ever underestimate that advantage.

regards,
  -- Robert
...wondering if this message will take over a day to reach the list like
his last ones.





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