BradReese.Com Cisco Hardware Quotes Call Toll Free 877-549-2680 or 828-277-7272

Home About Repair Power Supplies Refurbished Blog Quick Links Site Map Contact Us

 
Brad Reese speaks out
Learn more about Brad Reese...
Archive
  Help

Aironet

Power Supplies

VoIP Gateways

Cisco Repair

Refurbished Cisco

Cisco CPQRGs

New Cisco

New HP ProCurve

Cisco Tools

Competitive Lab Tests

Tech Forums

How-to Tutorials

CCIE Gossip

Blogroll

 
View archive of Brad Reese speaks out

Subscribe

Twitter tweet slugfest: Cisco ACI vs. Arista Networks

So what started this entertaining Cisco ACI vs. Arista Networks Twitter Tweet slugfest? Well, Cisco claims a lot of 'open things' around ACI, but the actual frame format on the Ethernet wire is a proprietary header they call eVXLAN.

New York City:   Mon, 6/23/14 - 6:06pm    View comments
 

Update 7/29/14 - 2:19pm:

"Software licensing, hardware costs, and bundles for starters and Catalyst 6500 upgrades."

Network World: A breakdown of Cisco ACI pricing
 



 

Earlier this month the New York Stock Exchange celebrated the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Arista Networks (ANET)
 


 

Fortunately for Arista employees, over the past 2-weeks (since Arista's June 6th IPO) they have watched the stock price of Arista soar, especially when compared to the stock price of Cisco, for example:

Stock price chart comparison of Arista Networks (ANET) vs. Cisco Systems (CSCO)
 

Stock price chart comparison of Arista Networks (ANET) vs. Cisco Systems (CSCO)
Source: Yahoo! Finance
 

I mean, Arista engineers appear to have made a wise employment choice while Cisco engineers are hopefully getting gratification from their work that helps facilitate the stock cash outs of Cisco's top executives and board directors.

And it now appears a boiling point may have been reached between the two!

How so?

Lincoln DaleJoe OnisickWell today, a former Distinguished Cisco Engineer (now an Arista engineer), Lincoln Dale, and Cisco's Nexus 9000 and application centric infrastructure (ACI) technical marketing engineer, Joe Onisick, have been slugging it out with Twitter Tweets that are exceptionally entertaining to read.

As an example, see the below screenshot of their Tweets:
 

Twitter slugfest
 

So what started this entertaining Cisco ACI vs. Arista Networks Twitter Tweet slugfest?

Well, Cisco claims a lot of 'open things' around ACI, but the actual frame format on the Ethernet wire is a proprietary header they call eVXLAN.

According to Joe Onisick:

"The overall confusion arises not from our use of technology, but from our slides. Slides with 'eVxLAN' are being phased out; because these lead people to believe that we use a proprietary protocol. We do not, we use VxLAN. The reason we originally used that differentiation is to distinguish between VxLAN tunnels within the fabric, as compared to those connected to the fabric."
 

Cisco ACI Frabic
 

So for all the rhetoric on 'Open APIs' the actual packet format is designed to lock out all other vendors and ensure that it is only Cisco in the switching layers.
 

ACI Frabic Architecture
 

Cisco has to open the provisioning APIs so customer systems can use them, and they have to connect to Load Balancers since Cisco got out of the market after getting trounced by F5 and others and they don't have commanding share in Security so they have to partner there as well (plus the market dynamics of security almost always demand multi-vendor).

According to Joe Onisick:

"BiDi are based on Cisco innovation and patents. They are currently available exclusively from Cisco... The reason the proprietary FUD is so laughable is because BiDi is an OPTION, not a requirement."
 

Optical Monitoring with a BiDi Optic
 

Related documents:

Joe Onisick Twitter Feed

Lincoln Dale Twitter Feed

35 page slide presentation: Cisco ACI Briefing

Related stories:

Network World: A breakdown of Cisco ACI pricing

Cisco Nexus 9000 switch starts at $79K for 288 ports

$125K entry level street price for Cisco application centric infrastructure (ACI)

Cisco's Nexus 9000 honcho slams famous CCIE Emeritus over Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
 


What's your take?

Contact Brad Reese

Brad's Favorite Story Picks

  1. Cisco's own customers are now competing against Cisco
  2. Famous Cisco CCIE Emeritus predicts switch hardware price plunge of -70%
  3. Reese's Las Vegas Grand Opening
  4. Predict Cisco's RTP campus a future CCIE ghost town
  5. Arista 7300-series switches cannot perform linerate forwarding of 40-byte TCP SYN packets
  6. $125K entry level street price for Cisco application centric infrastructure (ACI)
  7. Palo Alto dollar revenue skyrockets +45% more than Cisco security dollar revenue
  8. How Cisco CCIEs can achieve higher pay
  9. Cisco's Nexus 9000 honcho slams famous CCIE Emeritus over Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
  10. Cisco buys Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded ThreatGRID
  11. John Chambers dumped 26% (750,000 shares) of his Cisco stake while giving Cisco Live keynote speech May 19, 2014
  12. Dave Evans Cisco's Internet of Everything (IoE) futurist/evangelist has hightailed it to stealth start-up
  13. Cisco CEO John Chambers sends letter to President Barack Obama seeking NSA reform
  14. Is it illegal to buy or sell gray market Cisco hardware with embedded software?
  15. Rumor Cisco channel VP Maria Cannon is out
  16. Cisco's 9-month FY14 revenue plunged only -$1.4 billion year-over-year
  17. Concerned that full-time Cisco CCIE proctors are not CCIE certified
  18. Top secret document contradicts Cisco's denial of NSA spy cooperation
  19. Did Cisco's videoscape czar Jesper Andersen get the guillotine?
  20. View the archive of Bloggers speak out on BradReese.Com
 
Subscribe
comments powered by Disqus

Supplement Cisco SMARTnet Contracts

 

©2014 Alliance Networking LLC - Home - About - Repair - Power Supplies - Refurbished - Blog - Quick Links - Site Map - Contact Us