Well, don't get me wrong, I'm very fond of ciscos, but I think that lately ciscos -stopped- working the way they are supposed to, and having problems became normal.

How many of you out there had to deal with CEF issues on a regular basis? Have you ever been told by the TAC that your interface card failed because of Alpha Particles? Who's been working on ciscos for years and HASN'T accidentally access-listed themselves off the router? Not to mention Cisco releases bug alerts on a weekly basis. And of course, EVERYONE knows cisco's answer to any problem they can't explain - "You need to upgrade."

These and more are the reasons cisco is slipping right now, and juniper has surged into a 30 percent core router market share.

Anyone who has conquered the steep learning curve of JunOS (made more difficult by having a cisco-oriented mind) has realized just how exponentially far Juniper has surpassed Cisco in almost every aspect of the core router market. Your configuration is error-checked and loaded all at once instead of one line at a time; the plethora of available command options can be entered in any order after you've reached a certain hierarchy (i.e. "ping 1.1.1.1 count 100 source 1.1.1.2" and "ping source 1.1.1.2 count 100" BOTH work), there is an onboard Unix shell, redundant synchronized routing engines, triple-redundant switching fabric, redundant backplanes, etc. etc.

It always comes back to price on the Cisco-Juniper debate, because as great as a Lexus is, most people really only NEED a Ford. It should be noted, however, that with a Juniper you get more than what you pay for.

But where I'm going with this is this: If Juniper can destroy them this badly in the core router market, it can also be done in the distribution, access, and switching markets.

Cisco has become a slow-moving behemoth, and I certainly hope that vendors like Juniper will cause Cisco to ditch their current slothful faceless-corporation style and drop some of their deep-pocket money into R&D that will revolutionize routing...again.

</flamecisco>