I hear you on the Cisco side. Their Meraki line is hanging on after the acquisition just because it’s too expensive and making too much margin to mess with. (Still a great product last I touched it though.) But the core operation is still roaming around waving tiny tyrannosaur arms making stuff that looks like the 90s when they were still cool.

Doubly feel your pain on the VM issues. Too much java, too many attempts to tie undisclosed “security” checks to physical hardware. They take an insane amount of time to boot/reboot as well, so if it has an allergic reaction it could literally be half an hour or more of down time.

We ran into an issue where if we had to reboot our core stack the Tomcat on the VM would fall over and then choke the service manager. So our minimum down time window went to like an hour after you add the still truly glacial cost of rebooting a stack of Catalyst series switches in the first place.

Up through Q3 2022, the cost per port was just math because IDC gave the numbers and all you had to do was calculate the percent growth year on year for revenue and ports and divide them.

I had not thought to worry if this included home networking–I assumed it was all corporate networking, not consumer networking.

Rants always welcome–they drive the thinking when they are a healthy rant, as this one is.

Thanks, John.

1. I can’t believe that the avg cost per gigabit of 1gb network ports is *still* approximately the same as in 2017. And is so much higher than all the others. I would think that 1gb copper would be dirt cheap these days.

2. Can you *please* label your Y axis in your charts? I spent way way way too many seconds trying to understand the pricing chart showing avg cost/per gigabit. As my teachers always said, label your axis for credit!

3. Do these numbers include home networking? I’m sure 99% of most people are still just running 1gb networks, but there’s certainly a smattering of 2.5/5/10gb home networks. And couple of a insane people with 100gb or faster.

4. Man, you pay more per port, but the costs of running fast potrs is just insanely good these days. Now for a datacenter, you need to double the initial cost since I assume most people want redundant links once you’re at the 10gb/s or higher, and certainly for the 100gb/s speeds. So that’s a question of when do ports drop from dual-deploy down to single deploy at the edge? Interesting question as speeds go up, but management cheaps out and guys just enough to get the job done without any redundancy cause it’s too expensive.

5. Cisco is defending it’s turf because of all the network engineers who are trained in cisco, don’t want to change, hate the idea of a second vendor because they have to learn more, no one gets fired for buying cisco, etc. Me, I’m personally ticked at Cisco’s VMs which all fail horribly if you VMotion them while running. Kinda defeats the entire purpose of having VMs in the first place.

Man, this turned into a rant, time to chill in 2024. Happy New Year!

Good year, all pals !!