Cisco can't say when long waits for hardware will end

Cisco has reported a record backlog of orders it can't fulfil – $14 billion worth – and can't say when supply chain issues will ease enough to let it deliver networking kit for which some customers have waited many months. Speaking on the company's Q2 FY2022 earnings call, chair and CEO Chuck Robbins said Cisco's supply chain …

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, that's a problem

For anywhere else, there's Huawei?

(old joke, I'm merely recycling)

:)

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

In the world of corporate IT

The mythical corporate IT dept in our distant parent company have decided that the CISCO switches we got 3years ago no longer meet the needs of Global Cyber Internet of Things Blockchained Cloud Metaverse and so need replacing with apparently identical CISCO switches - and more importantly there was unspent budget at the end of last year.

CISCO are giving us "end of 2022" as a possible delivery date. Hopefully no new IT buzzwords are invented this year which makes these obsolete

[Aitor 1]

Re: In the world of corporate IT

Plus the "obsolete routers" are almost the same as the new ones.

Cisco just refuses to deliver the sw to old products, hey, you got to sell new kit!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: In the world of corporate IT

I always assumed Cisco's build system was linked to their share price, when the stock drops they obsolete a product

[sanmigueelbeer]

Cisco has reported a record backlog of orders it can't fulfil

Honestly, I am not concerned about the long lead times. What keeps me up at night is how many more price rises, attributed to "chip shortage", are expected for this year.

One has been quietly added on February 1, 2022.

If the price rise is due to "chip shortage" then why is the SKU for e-licenses and maintenance contracts included?

[linux2112]

Whitebox options are cheaper with less wait time

With the way big box vendors have been ripping off their customers this chip shortage feels like tech karma.

I know several colleagues and friends that have had some really good luck with White box solutions. You're basically

deploying an OS on to a bare metal switch and managing it through a controller. I played around with one of these solutions

in a lab and what I really liked was that you get automation through a single pane of glass view and you which saves

you time and sanity along with saving money of course. Whitebox solutions like Pica 8 and Pluribus are deployed on

either Edgecore or Dell switches that take a few months instead of a year or in some cases longer. I don't know that I'd

start with a big data center refresh going the Whitebox route but if I were spinning up a virtual data center or had a something like 10 40 gig

top or rack switches going end of life or just crapping out it might be worth trying.