You don't want Bay
As somebody who has a few Bay B[CL]Ns in his network along with the requisite army of Ciscos, I regretfully must concur. They had an architectural lead over Cisco until VIP2-40/50s, (d)CEF and the 12000, but they haven't been keeping up. Cisco has Bay outmatched in scalability, density, software stability, breadth of product line, modern features (CAR, policy routing, WRED, etc.), support, documentation, ease of configuration -- there are still some things you can't reasonably configure on a Bay without Site Mangler pumping SNMP into it, and unfortunately sometimes a router in a bad spot isn't easy to access via anything but its console, visibility (our net management guys seem to have a harder time dealing with Bay), and overall sleep-cycle impact. Heck, Cisco routers even look better. Nowadays there's not much reason to consider Bay other than cost, and over the long run, I believe the Bay TCO is higher. And it's a heck of a lot easier to hire somebody with relevant Cisco experience than with Bay or 3com. Don't ever underestimate that advantage. regards, -- Robert ...wondering if this message will take over a day to reach the list like his last ones.