Amazon Plans To Challenge Cisco in Networking Market With Much Cheaper Switches, Report Says (theinformation.com) 126
Amazon Web Services already dominates the market for cloud services. Now, reports The Information, it is eyeing a part of the cloud business it doesn't already control: the $14 billion global market for data center switches [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: AWS is considering selling its own networking switches for business customers -- hardware devices that move traffic around networks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cloud unit's plans and another person who has been briefed on the project. The plan could plunge Amazon more deeply into the lucrative enterprise computing market, posing a direct challenge to incumbents in the business like Cisco, along with Arista Networks and Juniper Networks.
As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.
As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.
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Re: Cisco in the death spiral (Score:2)
True, but they have a huge competitive advantage with linking that name and their very popular cloud service. At some point, the regulators will start taking a more active interest in Amazon, but Iâ(TM)m sure Amazon already has a significant number of lawyers working on this very issue.
Re:Cisco in the death spiral (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard the same thing about John Deere growing up. That John Deere was just green paint and a lot of snobbery.
Here's what I learned, farmers and ranchers are businessmen. They need to get work done like every other business. Downtime costs money. John Deere tractors still break down, get stuck in the mud, wear out, etc. It's that the competition do this more often. There's still some snobbery and such in there, John Deere tractors can have leather seats and built in refrigerator. They spend the money on the "green paint" because it gives them more return on their investment.
Is Cisco just a name? Maybe that's true now but they can only get to be "a name" by proving to be better over time. No one Is GMC just a name? Is Apple? Businessmen buy this stuff because it makes them money. If Cisco stops making people money, or rather they can make more money with someone else, then Cisco will disappear. Same goes for Apple, John Deere, and GMC.
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If Amazon use them, it's good for me too (Score:3)
Re: Already have cheap competitors (Score:2)
Ciscoâ€(TM)s data center switches (something which has fed me and my family for 6 years) are not adapting to modern networks. Cisco is so heâ€(TM)ll bent on ACI and even EVPN that they are not making their systems cloud friendly.
See, ACI is â€oeSoftware Defined†in purely the loosest sense of the word. It is very poorly suited for use with containers and FaaS as those systems
Reminds me of Cisco & Linksys... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of Cisco & Linksys... (Score:5, Informative)
Cisco have always had a slightly odd business model when it comes to R&D. How often has some mysterious stealth startup been formed to investigate a new idea, with a remarkable number of ex-Cisco people as its initial staff, and subsequently bought by Cisco to bring the technology back in-house if it was promising?
I don't know what you mean by the high-end switch market being a mess. It's still dominated by a few big names, Cisco among them.
For all the promise of SDN, so far it's much more talk than action. The brave few who have tried it at large scales so far have rarely spoken positively about the results. At this level, getting your gear from one supplier who also has you on a lucrative support contract still seems to work out much better in the real world than buying white box gear from that guy, buying another type of white box gear from the other guy over there, installing some Linux-plus-drivers "network OS" from his mate on each of those boxes, and then trying to get 80% complete and 60% working SDN infrastructure running on top. SDN is eating traditional networking alive in the same way that Linux is eating Windows alive on the desktop: only in the dreams of its most loyal fans.
I'm not sure what Docker has to do with switching at any serious level. All the networking other than connectivity between containers/VMs running on the same big box is still hardware based.
And as a final comment, don't be fooled by arguments about big price savings compared to established brands like Cisco. No-one pays anything close to list price at high volume.
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SDN is still mostly just Marketing Lies(tm). The only people to really do it, have been doing it much longer than the term has existed. And they do it with in-house designed technology that Works For Them(tm) -- and they generally don't share. (facebook and rackspace claim to opensource their shit. Good luck trying to use what little they've shared.)
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Cisco bought Linksys to get it's name into the consumer market. It failed. All it did was tarnish the name "Cisco" in the enterprise market, and significantly confuse people who don't know the difference.
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I still have my Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 router with its Cisco logo. LOL.
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I used to replace Cisco switches with throwaway Celetron PC's and cheap ethernet cards. They worked just fine and cost almost nothing.
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70% lower than which Cisco price ? (Score:1)
Cisco always has to prices: The list-price and the retail price to customers who are "in the know". The latter is usually 60-70% below list-price.
Which one is Amazon going to undercut ? If it is the first... Meh... Not so interesting.
If it is the second... Then things get interresting. They will even be undercutting HPE/Aruba then.
More then the equiptment. (Score:3, Insightful)
We are able to get switches and routers for cheap for a while. Many have the same features that Cisco offers.
The reason most companies stick with Cisco, is because they are able to find Certified Staff to work on their products.
If a company tried to upgrade to Amazon Fire Sale Switches, then you need to find staff willing to maintain them and do it properly with best practices in mind, may be difficult. You can probably get Cisco Certified staff to work on them, however if there are any differences there may be an issue.
Re:More then the equiptment. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't help but think that "Cisco certified" is a giant circle jerk of empire building, premium brand affiliation and so-called network experts hiding behind their Cisco manuals telling everyone how complex switching is.
It used to be that Cisco and networking were synonymous, but not for a long time. There's too much competitive product and often a lot cheaper but a lot of orgs keep buying into the Cisco myth,
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Well just march right down there and get yourself a CCIE and find out just how easy it is. ROFL
Re:More then the equiptment. (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of the networking out there doesn't get more complicated than VLANs, QoS and spanning tree with maybe some pretty trivial static routing on top of it. You might find a little bit of OSPF routing here and there, either bigger physical campuses or multi-site environments trying to deal with automating failover between MPLS circuits and IPSec backups.
You need a CCIE for that like you need a PhD in chemistry to cook dinner.
That's not to say that CCIE isn't one of the best vendor certifications and CCIEs aren't smarter than the average bear, but it's also a pretty narrow space where it's an applicable requirement outside of larger telcos, data centers and carriers, and maybe places bought into very broad Cisco-specific product suites.
My point is mostly that the Cisco crowd likes to make "muh networking skillz" into some kind of mystical knowledge when it really isn't. It mostly seems like they hide behind a greatly elevated sense of phony expertise, which Cisco and their resellers are only all too happy to reinforce.
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Throwing packets around coherently requires discipline, but it is certainly not rocket surgery. Cisco has a motive for making it more difficult than it really is; therefore, the people who mastered that falsely elevated difficulty are also falsely proud of their accomplishments. Nobody wants to hear that what they worked so hard to learn is really much simpler than what was presented. So they remain proud of their accomplishments.
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Thanks, I wasn't able to put into words like that. There's a feedback loop where Cisco makes things (at least seem) more difficult than they should be, the people who do it are invested in sorting it out, and want to keep that going by keeping their organization invested in what "only they can do".
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Its hard, but thats just because Cisco builds their own standards built on top of other actual standards. Like EIGRP, VTP, VSS. And then, of course, they license everything in strange ways, like you can do VSS on a 4500x but not a 3850, etc. And the hardware compatibility is insane up and down the stack.
So you have to have people that can cut through all the overhead BS that is Cisco instead of just working on networks.
Personally I've waited a long time to see Cisco get cut. Its happening, slowly. HP/Ubiqui
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Oh it is. That is the same with all Certification programs. However the advantage of Certified engineers working on your stuff, isn't that they are smarter or better then what anyone else could do with. But what it does do is keep the work rather consistent.
I am not a networking guy myself. If given a job to do networking, I can probably get it to work, but in the future when the real networking people come in they will look and be scared about the insane job I did, where it could had been done much more e
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Most CCNA's I've dealt with are in the same boat. The network engineer will be horrified to figure out the creative ways you had to get it to work. Cisco's product line is such a moving target that a CCNA is useless. I've yet to find someone with a current CCNA that actually had a practical knowledge of network setup from the ground up. CCIE's are a different breed, they spent 10s of thousands on classes and taking tests. They are required to have a much deeper understanding of networking in general.
On top
Re:We withdrew from the Paris agreement (Score:1)
Says the guy that has probably never needed to call Cisco TAC lvl2 about a zero day bug found in a $10 mil+ DC.
There's lots of competitors out there and the telco I work for has all of them in small amounts in both DC's but none of them comes close to Cisco TAC until that changes we won't move over anything major over to the wannabe's except edge devices (Aruba switch/controller/ap combo's).
Juniper comes the closest but there layer7 support (next gen firewalls like Palo's) isn't there yet.
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That is all fine and good, unless your networking needs is different then what Amazon or Netflix needs are.
Cisco can normally rattle off names of companies in your industry who are successful with their product.
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'Bigger' is not the only metric.
For example, a lot of very large internet datacenters have extraordinarily convoluted networking configuration, which is fine if you have expertise and need the power, but broadly speaking most don't need that power but they do need simplicity.
They might have decided their equipment works best with small broadcast domains and just focus on layer 3 technologies, but a shop may have been doing just fine with their oversized broadcast domain because their network vendor made the
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Sometimes you need a tractor trailer to do a job, other times you need a Dump Truck. Both can haul hundreds of tons of material. But they do it differently.
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The thing is that because of this the CLIs for most competitors are very similar, and for routers you are mainly looking at differences between noun-verb and verb-noun syntaxes. The idiosyncrasies between brands can be a challenge, and the management tools can vary tremendously... but it simply isn't the case that you *need* the Cisco branded equipment.
With Cisco experience as an example, picking up configuration on a Ubiquiti switch isn't a huge deal. Mixing and matching all day long will be frustrating,
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Amazon already has a certification program around AWS. It's not going to be very hard for them to add an "Amazon Certified" program.
Assuming the hardware is not shit, getting some people to get that certification and getting some company to install that hardware is not going to be hard for a massive cloud behemoth. Start with their own staff and datacenters. "We run AWS on these" should sell well enough to start making inroads.
At that point the market will pick a winner.
Amazon Prime comes to network gear (Score:5, Funny)
What's in it for us? (Score:2)
From Amazon's perspective this makes sense, provide priority bandwidth for Alexa and Amazon Prime as well as providing a way of monitoring customers' internet habits. Hopefully, they will be providing a high level of security so the information they're accessing/collecting doesn't become available to third parties.
When there are *lots* of low-cost switches that I don't have to worry about Amazon's potential for taking over my home, why would I want to buy from them?
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The incremental cost of offering for sale something they manufacture for themselves already is low, and the opportunity for profit is high.
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These are switches for datacenters, not your house. It is unlikely that Amazon is interested in getting you to buy one.
Silly (Score:2, Insightful)
I.e to get into market, start with solid cheap stuff (where the requirements are low). Then try to fight the big players.
My estimated outcome: either they do not survive one year
Re:Silly (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially with upstarts like Ubiquiti Networks entering with ridiculously inexpensive hardware good features and easy to use management software.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon just buys them as their entry into the market.
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... so long as you don't mind waiting 6 weeks for an RMA when your Ubiquiti unit fails. Never again.
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Incorrect. A growing amount of Cisco hardware is running linux. Old School IOS and Old School PIX aren't linux -- which shouldn't be a surprise as they pre-date linux, but modern ASA, NX-OS, IOS-XR/XE have a linux base. (XR started out with QNX and moved to linux ~5yr ago)
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running on top of linux... on top of commodity merchant (*cough*broadcom*cough*) silicon.
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We pay top dollars (maybe 4x any other brand total cost, the license is ridiculously expensive) for Cisco because they are proven to work and don't fail.
Cisco also continues to find hard-coded admin passwords in the products:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
Incompetence? Deliberate act? Hard to tell the difference...
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For various levels of "Proven" - Cisco today isn't the Cisco of the late 90s and early 2000s. They've now got a lot of products that really don't live up to the legendary brand name.
Their support is good and their core products are good. If you can afford them.
Cisco's real problem is Cisco. They've got that 90s era pricing structure of "Pay out the ass for features, then again for CALs, then again for support." Their sales culture is appalling. They're really out to sell you anything and everything you don'
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I used to love replacing Cisco with HP, when I worked on networks 10 years ago. Now there are plenty of other choices for commodity switching gear. I didn't realize you can now buy 5 port "managed" switches for around $25. Finally got rid of the old hubs I had hanging around for sniffing traffic.
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We pay top dollars (maybe 4x any other brand total cost, the license is ridiculously expensive) for Cisco because they are proven to work and don't fail.
This is true. Cisco gear CAN be the toughest of the tough. In one of my networks, a switch had been hit by a 7.62 millimeter round and it stopped working. Unplugged it, plugged it back in, and it started working again. Had a bunch of Cisco reps present because were signing a $500 million SmartNet deal with them and they begged to take pictures of my switch to use for marketing purposes. I imagine many people saw pictures of that 3650 (iirc).
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100 years from now Amazon will be the new Umbrella or Cyberdyne System Corporation.
They're only 5 years away from being Veridian Dynamics.
How much to get rid of ads? (Score:2)
Is it still going to be cheaper than Cisco when you pay to not get ads delivered to everything connected to your network switch?
Is this going to be like their phones and their tablets and their e-readers where you have to pay more not to get ads?
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Because fuck you, that's why.
They're so locked into that mentality that 10 Gbps needs to cost $$$$ that instead of pushing forward they're pushing backward by shitting out multiple half-assed "solutions" for teaming two 1 Gbps links on consumer / small business gear, as well as teasing eventual support for 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps standards.
They blame cat 5e cabling, but you can run 10 Gbps over cat 5e in "short" runs (probably up to 40 meters).
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So what are Amazon's plans to address support of both software and hardware? How will they fix security issues and other bugs? Will they provide the needed assurance this won't be abandoned in another couple years for the next new shiny thing? Or do they just plan to dump their stuff on the market and hope for the best and tell the end customer they need to support it?
So what are Cisco's plans to address support of both software and hardware? Shit out untested, buggy software with huge security holes on reliable, but extremely overpriced hardware? Etc.
Cisco isn't exactly highly regarded anymore. It's the entrenched standard people are afraid to move away from. The devil you know.
Not a difficult task (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't take a whole lot to undercut Cisco since they have always had ridiculous pricing.
Even companies with damn near infinite amounts of cash finally started looking at other vendors because of ludicrous price levels.
However !
That said, I have decommissioned Cisco routers and switches that have been running ( without a reboot ) for twenty plus YEARS without a hiccup.
I doubt you're going to find that sort of reliability in anything offered at rock bottom prices.
So, while expensive as hell, I can't complain about the operational track record.
Re:Not a difficult task (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, but in 5 years to you expect you will find much equipment that is 5 years old today left in operation? If so, is it at its "smashing point?" (Smashing point is where it is cheaper to replace something that works for something new with better performance.)
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Hmm live upgrade on a 20 old switch/router, did Cisco dot thst back then, ore are ypu inderctly telling us thst the box has 20 year ol firmware? I’m shure I’m missing something here so any info is apprecuated.
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You can have one very reliable Cisco switch or four redundant cheaper ones.
Take your pick between NSA and Chinese backdoors.
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Everyone has ridiculous *list* pricing. Anyone buying Cisco gear in quantity is going to get a healthy discount from list. I used to work for a Cisco partner, who got 40-60% off.
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Does the discount include NSA monitoring? (Score:3)
Lower 10gb and 40gb pricing (Score:1)
Re:Hardware? We don't need no stinkin hardware. (Score:5, Informative)
Software defined networking is great when dealing with networks at a high enough level. People have been making routers from commodity hardware for a very long time. Obviously people have produced special purpose hardware for routing as this means they can optimize the hardware for the task and can do so cheaper than someone grabbing a PC, filling it with interface cards, and loading some software onto it.
Switching is different than routing, it's done on a different level. The hardware needed is more complex, and therefore more expensive, than what is found in commodity computers. Go and try to find a software defined switch. I tried, and they don't exist. The closest you will find is a switch defined as a virtual machine. Load up something like VMWare ESXi and you'll find a way to create a software switch, but it can only switch packets among the virtual machines on that system.
People have made limited software switches with server style Ethernet cards (which grant greater access to the packet content than a desktop Ethernet controller) and the right kind of software but they are expensive and slow. They are really only useful for things like testing, training, or demonstrations.
This is a big deal because this means Amazon is getting in the hardware business in a way that is quite rare. Amazon is a large enough company that they may actually be able to follow through.
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Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
In terms of software defined switches, generally speaking they consider any switch that can be ONIE to be 'SDN-friendly', and some others.Sure, there are switching chips doing the actual moving of the data (there pretty much has to be), but their primitive capabilities are exposed to software for more in depth wrangling.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the p
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Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
Yes, I realized that was quite probable after I submitted my post.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the point of diminishing returns for almost everywhere to bother with.
Agreed, I imagine there is a market for software defined switching but it is quite small because the costs outweigh the benefits for most cases. I can also imagine much of that market exists in places where much of the network is virtual, like the VM clusters I mentioned in my previous post. It may be possible that software defined switches could gain more of the market. I'm thinking that not only would cost be a consideration but also sec
Re:Hardware? We don't need no stinkin hardware. (Score:4, Informative)
At layer 2, the promise of value is more granular control over packet forwarding than designating vlans.
The switch chips under the covers have a great deal of impossibly complicated capabilities that traditional switch config software abstracts away to basically vlan and not much else. Traditionally there is also sometimes helpful filtering (e.g. 'do not forward ethernet frame if it's dhcp response'), though that is a bit rare and generally hard to configure. There exists a contingent of folks who want to go deeper and imagine higher performance topology (e.g. a fat tree, torus, dragonfly, basically the sorts of topologies you see in infiniband and omnipath) that spanning tree would spit all over, and MST or similar would be too coarse. TRILL was the 'non-SDN' answer proposed to provide other topologies on ethernet, but that didn't pan out.
Problem is that in practice, it's trying to reinvent the infiniband sort of strategy (openflow controller is like an infiniband subnet manager) and this is very difficult to pull off, and generally superfluous for most people and the rest could... just get infiniband where the solution is pretty mature....
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Software defined networking is only useful for service providers to secure access. When you have multiple customers hosted on the same VMWare servers you need to make a network that is scale-able and secure. You do this by creating a separate subnet and a private vlan. If they have multiple machines across several vmware hosts then you create a community pvlan and away you go. Everyone can share the same primary private vlan which allows for easy subnetting but the switch won't allow them to cross secondary
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Hmm, I'm using 10Gbps software switch as real 10Gbps switch is still too expensive...
Just group your interfaces into a bridge -- after all the core function of a switch is a bridge. No software required; it's build into the kernel already.
# man bridge
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Yes this can be done with a regular computer but it will not perform at near the same level as a real managed switch that is using ASICs to do all the work which are purpose built to do exactly that. They will outperform a CPU doing the work every-time. You can throw a ton of CPU at a PFSense box and achieve good performance but then you might as well bought a real firewall which will be easier to manage and perform even better.
I say that as someone that threw together two old servers to make a PFSense HA
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Switching is in fact FAR simpler then routing. Layer 3 switches are a hybrid router with switching logic. Pure switching simply looks at feild X in a packet and switches it to the correct egress port with a single table lookup. That is trivial. Routing has to look at the entire table and match based on a list of rules. Layer 3 switches let you bring the joys of policy routing to switching. There is real need for 100G switches in a affordable price point for DC's. Along with that they want layer3 switching/r
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Yes, software switches do exist (aka "bridge"), but, as you mention, they're slow as crap because software (general purpose CPU) has to move frames from interface to interface.
Amazon isn't "getting into the hardware biz". They're just going to (sub)contract that shit to any number of "white box" switch makers already gluing common Broadcom (etc.) switch SoCs to boards. The OS on those boxes will most likely just be a customized / rebadged existing network OS.
Re: Hardware? We don't need no stinkin hardware. (Score:1)
"Hardware? I though everything was headed towards SDN (software defined networking)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking"
(Your article says SDN started becoming a topic in 2011.)
1)You would think AWS would know a bit about SDN, since they basically invented it, and made it available as part of a service to customers in 2009, except they called it VPC:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Virtual_Private_Cloud
2)You probably still need networking-specific hardware; you want a higher rat