A case against vendor-locking optical modules

Tue Nov 25 18:59:02 UTC 2014

I've found the best method of dealing with vendors like this is to treat
them the same way they treat you. If they won't listen to technical
arguments and act like stubborn children, then I act the same way. Threaten
to take your ball and go home. Or buy everything used or from grey market
vendors. It works pretty well. The vendor/client relationship is a two-way
street, and they should be reminded of that.

Especially when dealing with commodity whitebox switch vendors like
Arista...who can easily be replaced with another whitebox switch vendor and
$networkOS.

-richard

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Naslund, Steve <SNaslund at medline.com>
wrote:

> They want the ability to buy off the shelf components when they
> manufacture.  They just don't want you to have the same privilege when you
> purchase.  Your switches and routers are made of a bunch of OEM components
> with some custom programmed ASICS and some secret sauce.  If they used non
> standard interface specs their costs would go through the roof as their
> power supplies, memory, storage, and NICS would be all custom development.
>
> Steven Naslund
> Chicago IL
>
>
> > On Nov 18, 2014, at 12:42 PM, "Baldur Norddahl" <
> baldur.norddahl at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > If they really wanted to lock you in, they would have triangular modules
> > instead of square...
> >
> > Or I suppose the vendors like to be able to shop around for modules,
> before
> > they relabel and sell them to you at a 10x markup.
>