
Facebook's New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco - smacktoward
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-news-cisco/
======
capkutay
Does Facebook have a fleet of 50,000 sales people going out and selling their
data center software to companies? Has anyone considered the fact that there
are probably a handful of companies that can staff huge, extremely skilled
developers to implement what facebook put it into place? Even if you can
download it and its free and open source, most companies want someone they can
call when their IT software doesn't work. Cisco isn't just a technology
company. They're a giant sales and services organization.

~~~
virtualwhys
> They're a giant sales and services organization

Case in point: SmartNET is tech support on steroids. It's truly unfathomable
how knowledgeable the person on the other end of the line is; they've been
_thoroughly_ trained in 1 particular area of Cisco networking related to the
class of device you own, and without fail have the solution to your problem.

Cisco is the only company I've encountered where the support contract is
laughably worth the price.

~~~
crazypyro
It helps that they have an entire educational line of courses to build up the
specific skills. I took the CCNA classes (and tutored for them at a local
community college) in high school and while they do go over basic topics like
7 layer model, its highly Cisco hardware specific and it helps to have funnels
like that into your support operations. It is similar to how Microsoft was
(still is?) in the operating systems industry.

~~~
chris_wot
That's sad. I did my CCNA about a decade ago now, and it was top notch and
although it covered Cisco gear, it was mostly about the underlying network
concepts.

~~~
crazypyro
It still covers those topics, it just uses specific implementation examples to
help you understand it. It is all still applicable to other hardware, but the
entire field (that is in the scope of an entry level cert, at least) is pretty
reliant on knowing the OS and scripting language of the hardware. I don't know
how you could say it is mostly about underlying network concepts when over
half the test is implementation specific Cisco questions. Maybe the changed
it?

~~~
chris_wot
That was sort of my point.

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jobu
This blog post by Alexey Andreyev goes into a lot more detail:

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-
data-center-fabric-the-next-generation-facebook-data-center-network/)

~~~
blrgeek
The original link needs to be replaced by this blog post. Wired has very
little detail, has some details incorrect (traffic within the network is NOW
more than outside the network? It always was :)

~~~
jlgaddis
It was posted a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609391)

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adventured
I've seen an awful lot of 'bad news for Cisco' type stories over the last
dozen years. Cheap Chinese clones were supposed to kill them, Juniper or
another domestic was going to cut deep into their business, Dell or some other
enterprise company in tandem with China / Taiwan or South Korea would build
generic 'good enough' products and undercut them and steal all their market
share....

And yet here they are, still doing $8+ billion per year in profit, $47b in
revenue, carrying $61b in cash, and maintaining substantial market share.

Facebook's new data center, and its implications, is not a meaningful concern
for Cisco.

~~~
chii
yep. If you're a small to medium enterprise (approx 100-1000 users), you're
not going to have the expertise of facebook's engineers. It's still going to
be much cheaper (in totality) to just buy cisco.

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ihsw
Not really. I'm sure they're happy they don't have to pour so much R&D into
engineering ever-growing core switches.

They're quite aware of the trend towards decentralization. Where Facebook et
al lead, other's will follow -- and Cisco will be right there to take your
money to give you what Facebook has accomplished.

~~~
kordless
What's interesting is the 'decentralization' here is actually a centralization
of compute for a single company, in a single location. Data gravity sucks.

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kordless
"You are going to see a brutal, brutal consolidation of the IT industry where
out of the top five players, only two or three of us will be meaningful in as
quick as five years." \- John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

[http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-ceo-brutal-times-for-
it...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-ceo-brutal-times-for-it-
coming-2014-5)

~~~
throwawayaway
Nice to see a bit of contrarianism for once.

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Alupis
This is nothing new. The "Just buy Cisco" mentality has been unnecessarily
draining funds from IT departments for years. Things like a $1,300 USD
Mikrotik router with 36 cors @ 1.2Ghz + 16GB ram[1] easily go toe-to-toe with
"heavy-weight" $5,000-10,000+ Cisco equipment, both in features and actual
throughput.

You do gain additional support when buying a "name brand" since there may be
more community resources available, however you really do your company a
disservice by not even considering far less expensive but equal alternatives.

[1]
[http://routerboard.com/CCR1036-8G-2SplusEM](http://routerboard.com/CCR1036-8G-2SplusEM)

~~~
scott_s
I think you are being unfairly dismissive. The novelty here is not in just
buying generic routers. It is in changing the architecture of their network:
[https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-
data-center-fabric-the-next-generation-facebook-data-center-network/)

~~~
jlgaddis
I'm pretty sure he didn't even RTFA.

And, related to what he wrote, yes, you can buy a more powerful Mikrotik
router for less than one with the Cisco name on it. The software on 'em sucks,
though, and they have some weirds things about them. Additionally, they used
to flagrantly skirt around the GPL although I'm not sure if they still do.

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walterbell
Not many details in this article - what defines a boundary between two "pods"
and how are they internetworked?

~~~
nbm
More details on the official FB announcement -
[https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/360346274145943/introducing-
data-center-fabric-the-next-generation-facebook-data-center-network/)

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001sky
Cisco stock has a flat to negative 10 year return (2004-2014).

Tells you everything you need to know.

Nothing has proven durable for them.

\- Broadband explosion

\- Two bull markets

\- Social media revolution

\- etc.

~~~
hyperbovine
Well, they would not be the first company to competently churn out well-
engineered products year after year and fail to become the darling of the
stock market. Also, I really fail to see how dialing on the social media
revolution would have magically caused they stock price to rise. Start calling
them "routr"s, perhaps?

~~~
001sky
The focus on the "widget engineering" is misleading. Are these the right
widgets? dunno. The bigger questions are about the widget business. The stock
is under-performing the market, despite major influexs of market inflation
(ie, price bias), and huge shifts in the secular demand for bit-throughput.

The company has had the leading position in the widget business for a
generation. But this raises questions about the future viability of the widget
business if ROI is essentially zero (?).

Is the widget business inherently not-profitable? Or is the company mismanaged
(outside of widget engineering?) I don't know the answers, but it seems people
should be thinking about them.

The engineering teams are mostly like not the main issue. The lack of more
lucrative product/market fit seems to be a perrenial issue for the higher
level exevutives.

