Amazon Web Services Isn't Making a 'Commercial' Networking Switch, Cisco Says (geekwire.com) 51
A week after a report claimed that Amazon Web Services was building its own bare-bones networking switch in a potential threat to networking giant companies, Cisco says it has checked with Amazon, with which it has long maintained a relationship, and it has been assured by the ecommerce giant that is not entering its territory. From a report: AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins had a "recent call" from which Robbins walked away satisfied that AWS wasn't "actively building a commercial network switch," Marketwatch reported Wednesday, citing a statement from Cisco that it confirmed as authentic with AWS. That follows a report last week from The Information that AWS was working on a so-called "white-box switch," which the site portrayed as a frontal assault on Cisco that sent networking stocks slumping on a lazy summer Friday afternoon.
That's not the purpose...yet (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to make the dog food, then eat your own dog food. And then, it becomes commercial dog food. This is the way of AWS already. Right now, they're just making this for themselves - any future application is pure coincidence.
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Linksys is owned by Cisco, so there's your market.
Linksys is owned by Belkin since 2013.
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That explains a lot. Never realized it. Just knew that newer models tended to be bad and overheat. Sounds like Belkin to me.
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Partially true, while both Amazon & Microsoft have rather unique needs which sees them often doing their own thing (Azure servers are a few inches wider than a standard rack so that they could fit in another set of hard drives, AWS actually uses some custom built (for them) Intel CPUs which aren't available to the normal market), these changes end up in custom hardware specs which get built by this or that OEM and often lack the OEMs branding.
Their goal with these tweaks is to have hardware that does ex
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And they are not the only ones, at this scale it is normal. Facebook worked with Intel to create teh Xeon-D processor (which is now available on the normal market as a SoC ITX board) https://code.fb.com/data-cente... [fb.com]
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Networking gear isn't as flexible as Software or consumer items.
Companies have spent a lot of money just on metal bars with holes drilled/punched with a particular size and spaced to fit most of the vendors equipment. Which supports standards that nearly all the other vendors support.
Amazon still dependent on Cisco hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
"We reminded Amazon of the contract language that prohibits them from selling competitive hardware devices or face immediate loss of support and revocation of all software licenses."
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Add to that, AWS is still trying to find a way into the corporate datacenter, which Cisco kinda sorta owns outright. AWS needs Cisco as a partner, at least for a few more years. But in a decade I wouldn't assume any or all of the above is still the case.
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I thought the AWS/VMware partnership was one of the paths for getting into the corporate data center, finally make the mythical integration of Vmware and AWS easy. VMware brings in Dell which brings in some reasonable competition for a lot of Cisco stuff.
So what if they did? (Score:2)
Cisco wouldn't care about yet another cheap switch (Score:2)
The story the other day was the Amazon was making cheap switches. Plenty of companies make cheap switches. Several make decent switches. That's not Cisco's market. Cisco sells IOS, and now IOS XR. A panel of ethernet jacks is a commodity that doesn't compete with what Cisco does.
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CIsco sells the brand. There may be niche markets where cisco gear is needed, but in the majority of situations, any of a number of vendors would operate just as well. Cisco gets by on inertia... a combination of slightly non-standard features that unwitting users have started using and are locked into, and the general cowardice of network managers to make the leap to buying something other than what their predecessor bought.
Don't get me wrong, Cisco's gear is top notch (though "top notch" these days real
Frequently the next standard, 5-10 years later (Score:2)
> . Cisco gets by on inertia... a combination of slightly non-standard features that unwitting users have started using
Quite often, the non-standard features Cisco offers become standardized 5-10 years later. They are simply ahead of the standards. Things like channel bonding and cost-based routing are now considered "must-have". They were unique to Cisco for years, before eventually the rest of the industry agreed on a standard.
Certainly not everyone NEEDS Cisco. Frequently though, it's far better to m
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Quite often, the non-standard features Cisco offers become standardized 5-10 years later.
Sure, but the standard is usually slightly different enough to be incompatible (because Cisco may be a leader but they also tend to be a bit short-sighted in their prototype standards... notwithstanding that hindsight is 20/20) When that's something like CDP vs LLDP, no big deal. When you are trying to integrate inter-vendor and your STP or multi-chassis-bonding won't interoperate well, it's a bigger deal.
Spending $500 more (usually more actually) for some features can be a good thing... but using certain
Lots of things to consider. Diy cam or cheap 3D pr (Score:2)
Yeah, there are a lot of things to consider. For my own SOHO use, used enterprise Cisco gear works pretty well. Just yesterday I needed to set up routed secure tunnels between my home office network and two other locations. That was easy to do with Cisco gear I got for almost free. Of course I'm a nerd, Cisco integrated services routers aren't for everyone.
Instead of constantly logging in to my employer's VPN with all three operating systems I use, a thought occurred to me - my employer's end of the VPN
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I clicked your signature link and saw you get Linux running on a printer - eight years ago. That's cool. Why?
I had some pent up regrets about not using any of the digital systems control stuff I learned in college... never did get far enough to do anything useful with it since I was amply distracted poking at the thousands of mystery registers.
Basically the way I saw it a printer is a prewired little robot... there's a lot more on there than just steppers and switches, more than you'd think. It's got light level sensors, environmental pressure/temp sensors and a lot of other goodies. So I got it as far as I did
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The story the other day was the Amazon was making cheap switches. Plenty of companies make cheap switches. Several make decent switches. That's not Cisco's market. Cisco sells IOS, and now IOS XR. A panel of ethernet jacks is a commodity that doesn't compete with what Cisco does.
Well, yes and no. What Amazon are likely doing are building their own switches for Software Defined Networking. It is a potentially disruptive technology, because it means cheap switches will do the work of expensive ones. For now it makes sense mostly for the big cloud vendors because the software is immature, and needs careful design. AWS is about building reliable systems out of cheap commodity components by getting the software right, so it's a natural fit.
Whilst Cisco doesn't have anything to worry abo
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But to make use of said Cisco gear, with updated software, you need a support contract. You know, that thing where your business relations person talks to their sales rep and irons out a deal where you give them a barrel of money in exchange for access to some website.
This is why Cisco equipment is difficult to support outside of an official corporate IT environment. So when I was doing my last round of network upgrades, I went with someone else... Not because I couldn't afford Cisco gear, but because I did
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FWIW, when you buy network gear it usually comes in with software that two release chains and at least a year out of date.
Dirt cheap Amazon switches (Score:1)
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Oh come on. They're Amazon, not Comcast.
But seriously, we had to switch to https to keep Comcast from breaking out web site.
Cloud Datacenters use Cheap switches (Score:1)
Data centers such as AWS, and Azure do not really on premium Cisco switches. They tend to deploy a cheap, bare-bones switch without all the fancy features. They then rely on their own software to do the heavy lifting. That is what SDN (Software Defined Networking) is all about.
And you believe them? (Score:1)
Interesting.
(starts shorting Cisco)
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Too late to short. The guys who wrote the original "sky is falling for Cisco" piece were waaaaay ahead of you.
I misspoke... (Score:4, Funny)
When we said "We aren't planning to not make commercial routers in competition with Cisco" what we meant to say was "We are planning to not make routers i competition with Cisco. Our bad. So sorry!" :D
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Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins walked away satisfied that AWS wasn't "actively building a commercial network switch,"
Of course they didn't tell him that they had it already built so of course they were no longer actively building it.
We only sell books! (Score:2)