How do you all feel about infrastructure routers and switches being treated as consumable supplies? $9k and it's gone in 6 years. $1500 a year for the privilege of routing or switching. Then you're hit with another huge $9k bill to repurchase the same thing you already had (with a few new features).
But are you buying the hardware, or the support? Hopefully the latter, as the hardware doesn't do anything a cheap Dell rackmount Linux box with sshd, two network cards and some firewall rules can't do for about $8000 less. So really you're paying $1333 a year for the privilege of Cisco's support operation for your routing and switching. That Cisco can afford to, effectively, supply their Certificates of Cisco Supportedness printed on chip-filled metal boxes as opposed to on plain paper, just goes to show how much of that $1333 must be profit margin.
Peter
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