I've found the best method of dealing with vendors like this is to treat them the same way they treat you. If they won't listen to technical arguments and act like stubborn children, then I act the same way. Threaten to take your ball and go home. Or buy everything used or from grey market vendors. It works pretty well. The vendor/client relationship is a two-way street, and they should be reminded of that. Especially when dealing with commodity whitebox switch vendors like Arista...who can easily be replaced with another whitebox switch vendor and $networkOS. -richard On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Naslund, Steve <SNaslund@medline.com> wrote:
They want the ability to buy off the shelf components when they manufacture. They just don't want you to have the same privilege when you purchase. Your switches and routers are made of a bunch of OEM components with some custom programmed ASICS and some secret sauce. If they used non standard interface specs their costs would go through the roof as their power supplies, memory, storage, and NICS would be all custom development.
Steven Naslund Chicago IL
On Nov 18, 2014, at 12:42 PM, "Baldur Norddahl" < baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
If they really wanted to lock you in, they would have triangular modules instead of square...
Or I suppose the vendors like to be able to shop around for modules, before they relabel and sell them to you at a 10x markup.