Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?
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@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
I only ever seen three scenarios of Cisco hardware owners:
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huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
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a specific feature or technology is required that only Cisco offers.
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The largest enterprises who need the largest equipment and biggest support contracts.
And loads of small, really clueless shops that buy purely off of airport marketing campaigns.
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@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc). -
@storageninja said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc).In the end, it'd still be a hell of a lot cheaper and more effective to go with non-Cisco hardware (given that points 2 or 3 don't apply to them).
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@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@storageninja said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc).In the end, it'd still be a hell of a lot cheaper and more effective to go with non-Cisco hardware (given that points 2 or 3 don't apply to them).
In many cases, it's cheaper to just go with someone else just because the time to talk them into a deal costs more than the competition.
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I replaced a Cisco a few weeks ago because we could get a Ubiquiti that was new faster, delivered to the site, than we could get a cable to hook into the Cisco. Saved both time and money and got them better quality gear. Pure win. Cisco's "deal with our BS" overhead is very high and a huge factor on their TCO.
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@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@storageninja said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc).In the end, it'd still be a hell of a lot cheaper and more effective to go with non-Cisco hardware (given that points 2 or 3 don't apply to them).
We big 2 Million with Brocade and Cisco bid 12 million. That said Cisco was the incumbent and the incumbent generally yields less margin in a mid-scenario as it's expected that the migration will be simpler (Just copy/paste configs and no new interop issues to worry about).
To be fair, we ran into two issues.
- Some GBIC's were non-transferable (Cisco proprietary, got missed in the audit, but was trivial to swap with some spares we had).
- The VDX6670 chassis had a limit on the number of ports it could provide multicast routing with PIM-SM for. We were warned, and since it could be tested after the fact we ended up using a temporary mitigation plan (Old ASR for RP), and Brocade had offered to make good a solution if we needed (They gave us a free MLXe on a 3 year loan to close the gap until VDI could replace imaging over the WAN).
Also to be fair to Cisco, Brocade wasn't a "major" player in ethernet and since then has split up its ethernet products into 3 companies so the customer now has to deal with Extreme for their Datacenter and another company for their ICX campus.
Still, the savings were worth it to that school.
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@scottalanmiller said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
I replaced a Cisco a few weeks ago because we could get a Ubiquiti that was new faster, delivered to the site, than we could get a cable to hook into the Cisco. Saved both time and money and got them better quality gear. Pure win. Cisco's "deal with our BS" overhead is very high and a huge factor on their TCO.
Their optics division makes 2 Billion a year I hear. 3rd party optics are made by the same people so I never blinked at using them and duck taping some spares to the side of the chassis.
