Rant:“Investment Protection” on the Cisco C6500 — It Isn’t Quite That Simple

Omar Sultan over at the Cisco Data Centre blog in this post claim­ing that the Cisco 6500 has a fant­astic invest­ment pro­tec­tion story.

Let’s face it, the Catalyst 6500 is the poster child for invest­ment pro­tec­tion. It has been ship­ping since 1999 and is still hap­pily chug­ging along.

Urrrmppffff.
Excuse me while I barf up my my breakfast. Sorry about this. 

Hang on, won't be a sec.


Right, where were we.

The real story isn’t quite so simple. While I agree that that the ori­ginal Catalyst 6000 (not 6500) was released in 1999 as a Layer 2 device, it has had more than half a dozen super­visors. The first Supervisor 1 wasn’t very good, Supervisor 1A (which fixed all the bugs) then the Supervisor II and IIA, Supervisor III (in sev­eral vari­ants) and then on the Supervisor 720 (in its many vari­ants) and, in back to the future blitz, the Supervisor 32 with a cut­down fea­ture set. Lets not for­get the Switch Fabric Modules (WS-​​C6500-​​SFM, WS-​​X6500-​​SFM2)

While the chassis has been con­stant (except for back­plane upgrade for Cat6000 and cer­tain mod­els amd early 6500’s around ²⁰⁰⁰⁄₂₀₀₁) you could make the claim that every Supervisor upgrade is a “rip and replace”.….if you were a mar­ket­ing per­son. After all, the chassis doesn’t get replaced.…. or does it ?

For those of us who actu­ally work in the field, repla­cing super­visors IS A RIP AND REPLACE pro­ced­ure. As each super­visor added fea­tures and drastic­ally changed the tech­nical land­scape, I rarely just “replaced the super­visor” as the risk was took great. We would always buy another chassis and “cutover” to the new unit.

Lets not for­get all the line cards — the 61xx cards using the 32GB shared bus, the 630xx POE, 65xx cards that con­nec­ted using single fab­ric lines and the 67xx cards that finally, ten years later meet the prom­ises that were made in 1999. Promises that seem con­veni­ently forgotten.

Oh yes, I remem­ber the Cisco Account Mgr telling us in tones of sepulchural joy about the amaz­ing fea­tures of the C6000 back­plane, and its future cap­ab­il­it­ies. How we purred over the spe­cific­a­tion and got excited. As the years passed, we for­got about the prom­ises and lived with the real­ity. (And they are also true of the Nexus 7000 as I wrote about early last year)

The beau­ti­ful future we were going to have, hold­ings hands as we ran through fields of beau­ti­ful flowers.

The archi­tec­tural limitations

As someone who has spent over ten hours this week explain­ing the lim­it­a­tions of the C6500, and how little band­width the back­plane has and how con­strained this makes your designs. The con­stant review of all the design tricks you need to make it run the way you inten­ded, espe­cially under high load.

Only two fab­ric inputs per card, no load bal­an­cing of those inputs. The Fabric has head of line prob­lems under load, the short­com­ings of over­sub­scribed line cards. The Supervisor 32 with truly lim­ited per­form­ance. Lets not for­get these things. What about all those line cards, and the rules and tricks you need to know about their per­form­ance ? How many queues per port ? Per port group ? Which back­plane is it using — the shared bus or the fab­ric, how many fab­ric con­nec­tions does it have ?

Here’s to the Catalyst 6500

But any­way, here’s a toast to the Cisco Catalyst 6500. Its a teen­ager now with hair in its armpits and a gruff voice. For all its cranky ways, and tan­trums, at least it has worked most of the time. It hasn’t been a bril­liant product, or the best at any­thing. But for most of us, that’s what we want — some­thing that just works.

On the other hand, I can still get sup­port. Maybe that’s what “invest­ment pro­tec­tion” really means.

Note to Cisco /​ Omar: This means less mar­ket­ing and more con­cen­tra­tion on what really keeps Cisco in busi­ness — tech­nical sup­port. The IT man­ager is usu­ally happy when the engin­eers are not grumbling about the product. Not because of some rub­bish about “invest­ment protection”.

Rant over.

PS: Cisco makes a lot of money out of maintenance

A related asser­tion I see folks try­ing is that Cisco doesn’t innov­ate because their switches are X years old. I will tell you, that as a com­pany, we are quite pleased to see a data cen­ter filled with dusty Cisco chassis. It means we have given our cus­tom­ers the abil­ity to add cap­ab­il­ity and capa­city based on their needs. It means we respect the invest­ment cus­tom­ers have made with us and it means our engin­eers are smart enough to pro­tect that investment.

This really means “we made a shed load of money out of selling main­ten­ance on the same old kit ever year. We’ve been rak­ing it in!”

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