Do you remember back in April of 2008 when I put a challenge out to Cisco, Blue Coat, Riverbed and Juniper for an old fashion throw-down at Interop? Well I have never forgotten and am still hopeful that it will happen one day, but then I woke up from a dream. Interop is the best place for a test like this and everyone knows it.
But Riverbed was the only vendor back then to say they would attend, Cisco would not return my call, nether would Blue Coat or Juniper.So everyone can go back and read the old post, it is here: Now that you have a little background, I want to talk about why will we never see a head-to-head test between vendors. Is it because they have too much to lose? If they lost at Interop in a throw-down then that’s it for them. So you really have to be sure of your product and the claims you are making. Would I have any better luck organizing a show down this year? I feel confident that Riverbed would be in (but, as a matter of disclosure, I am a Riverbed reseller, with a close relationship with that company.) But then I got to thinking, have any of you run your own tests pitting Cisco, Juniper or Blue Coat WAN acceleration equipment against each other? What did you find? I still hope one day we can have these vendors bring their appliances into a room at Interop and set them up on a network in place. I have storage, virtualization, servers and VoIP companies who will donate gear to use in the network. Please tell us why you think a throw down will never happen.