No longer is it verboten to mention Juniper and HP in the same breath as Cisco when talking about quality networking equipment. Hopefully, Cisco can get back on track and refocus on it's core networking products.<p>Interesting that they are letting go 6500. "6500" is their workhorse networking device but has been in market for about a decade now and needs a serious overhaul to be competitive again compared to Juniper's MX and the Brocade XMR devices.
I bought a bunch of Cisco "Small Office" series equipment recently. Some of the items, particularly the NAS (NSS 300 series), have been very disappointing.<p>More disappointing, though, is that there seems to be no simple way to get meaningful support or contribute feedback afterwards. Half the canonical links on their web site don't even work. They seem to have a whole bunch of forums scattered around the site, but it looks like you can only participate after jumping through all kinds of hoops that we just don't have time for.<p>You can't even download documentation on how essential features work. Obvious example: If we're using encryption on our NAS, how does the key system work and do we need to keep a back-up copy of anything like that in case one of the disks in the RAID array fails? More subtle example: If there is this great integration with Mozy to deal with off-site back-ups automatically, why can't I even find out the prices and do basic due diligence about data security before I sign up for the service, and why did the Mozy call centre staff apparently not even know about the deal and the Mozy sales e-mail address not even reply to a basic enquiry? Is there even anyone at Cisco we can talk to about this?<p>Given that the only other reason to buy the Cisco version of the NAS rather than the original model from QNAP seems to be the Cisco 5-year "support", and the QNAP has had all sorts of enhancements and new functionality rolled out in the intervening period while Cisco have done squat, it's all one-way traffic in our office, and it's away from Cisco.<p>So I'm not surprised they're tightening up. If their other groups are performing as poorly as their Small Business people, I imagine they're suffering a rapid exodus of customers to organisations that understand the meaning of the term "customer service" and realise that professionals working with their kit have a job to do and don't like to waste time.
6,500 employees ... 15% to come from the vice president level and above ... up to $1.3 billion in severance expenses ...<p>Wow. If I'm not mistaken, that's $195 million split up among an unknown number of VPs (let's say, what, 50 of them?), leaving around $171k per remaining employee.<p>Either those are very, <i>very</i> nice severance packages, or there is some tremendous overhead that I don't understand.