That's a wonderful thing...
I do think Cisco needed to do this to get them through the next generation of networking...

Okay, here is how I see Cisco's strengths...

- Rock solid hardware.
- Legendary IOS which is awesome when you're fluent with it.
- Low power consumption.
- patches released before bugs and security vulnerabilities are announced.
- with proper configuration methods the box is secure (even with some of the security vulnerabilities).

But, that's all good back in their days.
The boxes were good, performed well, and so on.

But here we are today and I can tell you that my 871W router that I bought 3 years ago (which is a long time ago in technology life) is no longer the rocket ship that it once was.
So what's changed ?

- I no longer have a drinking straw.
-- The router flat lines when doing 15MBps throughput (and Cisco says it will do 12 MBps)
-- The router will add about a 4-5mSec delay

So here I am, saving up some money and looking at different options, and right now replacing my Linux server with a more powerful one with redundant disks looks quite appealing...
See I want the following features...

- High performance routing to the Internet
- I want firewalling as well
- And IPv6 support
- VoIP, at least a proxy, but why not have it as a keyphone system with a mailbox ?
- Ah, my kids are getting older and know about the internet, I want to know what they are doing...

So here we, with a Linux solution...

- routing at least 100 MBps
- iptables
- ip6tables
- asterisk
- squid
- add to the list...

So, how do we get these features...

- Rock solid hardware.
- Legendary IOS which is awesome when you're fluent with it.
- Low power consumption.
- patches released before bugs and security vulnerabilities are announced.
- with proper configuration methods the box is secure (even with some of the security vulnerabilities).

With these features...

- High performance routing to the Internet
- I want firewalling as well
- And IPv6 support
- VoIP, at least a proxy, but why not have it as a keyphone system with a mailbox ?
- Ah, my kids are getting older and know about the internet, I want to know what they are doing...
- Add to the list.

And remain competitive in the marketplace ?

On Sat, 2008-04-12 at 07:45 +1200, Ian McDonald wrote:

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/04/cisco-set-to-dominate-linux-ma.html
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3740106

I don't know enough about Cisco routers to know which series this
applies to. Maybe Lindsay might like to comment?