Douglas Gourlay Mar 7, 2008

Ori my friend, this is a great article!  However, unfortunately it supports my thesis quite well.  Per Wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat  The Fiat Group S.p.A. owns both Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.  Ferrari also is the parent company of Maserati.  So while they use the different brands to address different market segments and geographical sales coverage it is still one company designing and building their engine, and then, as you point out, a series of ‘tweaks’ to market it across their portfolio of products.

This is analogous to us taking the switch fabric ASIC from the Catalyst 6500 which is now resident within the MDS 9500 and the Cisco Nexus 7000 as well. A perfect example of choosing the best and enjoying the best engineering out there! 

vidhya_mahadevan Mar 8, 2008

I like this article

kgraham Mar 8, 2008

Its still a weak analogy. As we look at high-end equipment intended for reliable, long term service under heavy load, while there are always some clever exceptions, it just doesn’t hold up.

Airbus, Boeing and Embraer have Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce and GE. For Peterbilt and International, there’s Cummins and Caterpillar.
Electric Boat and Northrup Grumman, there’s
Westinghouse, GE, and Bechtel. ...and in some cases, Cisco has Marvell and Broadcom.

There’s nothing wrong with this. The danger is in thinking that the value of the product ends with the hardware.

yaron Mar 12, 2008

just a small reminder, most high-end servers used to be based on self developed RISC processors
now most servers use x86 architecture, even high-end ones, since its hard to compete with Intel & AMD pace

i’m not sure some of those servers can be called lawn mowers

Sundar Iyer Mar 13, 2008

My humble two cents: Aye on Doug’s comment. When comparing the value of something it helps to see whether the customer still “sees” added value directly, and whether we have reached the point of diminishing returns. As far as large Enterprise routers are concerned, we have aye on the former, and nay on the latter. Take power reduction as a simple example (since there’s a lot of green being talked here)—when done with in house silicon you can implement features, turn off I/O’s, memories, parts of ASICs, et. al. with intimate knowledge and statistics gathered online and dynamically. This is not something you can do well with off the shelf silicon. Ditto on say system/network memory architectures which need to support bandwidths of 100Gb/s. We can’t build a product which buffers 10ms at 100Gb/s with sub 2ns random cycle times without in house silicon/memory innovations/ASICs.

Over time any stagnating product, for example lawmmovers where their may not be much innovation left, or extra value to the customer (some may still argue otherwise - oh well cut that noise out!), can be better addressed by off the shelf silicon (if the volumes are large enough). In contrast, we are still in the rapid innovation phase for high speed networking/data centers and in house silicon is a big product differentiator.

Douglas Gourlay Mar 14, 2008

Kgraham,
is there a better analogy I should have used?  I am still looking for a few more good ones…

dg

Rob Marley Jun 30, 2008

What good is a Ferrari if it is to expensive to upkeep when it breaks down. We know all cars (and lawnmowers) will have downtimes. A lawnmower may not be as cool, but it may be higher on the dependability scale!!!

http://routersboard.info Jun 20, 2008

routers Free routers information packet.

http://easylawnmower.info May 27, 2008

lawnmower Deluxe lawnmower items.