There used to be an old saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM", then IBM was replaced by Cisco. Anyhow, a long term customer of mine was fired yesterday for his long term and ongoing support of an ACI Data Center project. In short it's been an ongoing debacle, CAP cases, outages, constant TAC cases, constant maintenance windows required for upgrades to fix the never ending stream of bugs. How did this company get such a big bet so wrong? Gutted.
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It's likely RTP will close soon.
Nothing new. I was ‘managed out’ of a previous employer after making the decision to implement a Cisco contact centre solution.
its a solid product - but you have to know what your doing. its not like the old days when you could just be lazy and let some 6509 throw packets everywhere.
Sad to say; similar situation.
LR'd three years ago, then became end customer.
Encountered firewall bug. With Cisco TAC and BU contacts both on phone during a webex, the BU (assuming Developer), did a procedure live that essentially bricked the FW.
The BU guy bolted from the phone and TAC was stuck with case. That was an over 24 hour outage.
I have always remained loyal to the brand, but after a few weekends of outages over what were supposed to be routine upgrades, the decision was made above me to migrate to another vendor.
That was the first time, as a customer, I was afraid for my job; our execs were upset and told my boss to figure out how to fix things once and for all.
That was a year or so ago. Now we are moving off of our medium sized Cisco core to another vendor.
Sad to see it happen, but I like my job so going with the flow.
I saw an email from a HUGE customer the other days, case had been open since mid-December and TAC were struggling, suggesting all sorts of whacky ideas. Discovered the cause in 20 mins. Basically an inter-op problem because of non-support of a feature that’s been on our roadmap for literally years.
To be fair, I’ve seen quite a few ACI customers be successful and happy. One particular customer loved it. They always had the same characteristics: One or two engineers focused solely on ACI, extremely talented/driven individuals. Those who were unsuccessful tended to be overworked, spread thin across many domains and lacked serious drive to learn something new.
What is so appalling is that a long term customer who trusted us, and believed the assurances from senior management through a CAP process is now without a job.
You could have stopped at ACI, we understand the problem.
TAC is so bad now even at basic stuff. You think they can troubleshoot an underlaying issue with complex VXLAN, LISP, MP-BGP, IS-IS underlay, etc. (which is what ACI builds under the covers). Albert Einstein couldn't fix a broken ACI fabric. Same could be said with SDA - although still-born with nearly no production implementations. By the way a lot of the original ACI creators left Cisco a while ago.
" Intercloud " ... it's gonna be BIG !!!