Whether pinched by tight budgets or propelled by plans calling for better ROI, enterprise buyers are realizing that used equipment is a viable alternative to new switching and routing devices.
It’s a fallacy that network equipment has to be factory-fresh to work long and well in the enterprise. Moreover, the notion that used means old in a functional sense simply is not true, particularly when you’re dealing with tried-and-true products.
Data Networks International, aka DNI (973/486-0440; www.dni-llc.com), proves the point that buying used is a good option to paying list prices for new equipment. The Stanhope, N.J.,-based firm has been serving the secondary network equipment market for more than a decade.
DNI President Paul Regolizio attributes his company’s success to quickly finding what a customer needs—down to the part number—and then leveraging the seller and buyer network he has built up over the years to deliver it at a price up to 70% less than what new products would be.
Regolizio’s company leverages a natural process. “Companies redesign, change, merge, or go out of business, which displaces a lot of top-quality network equipment,” Regolizio says. “Then we purchase, refurbish, inventory, and resell.”
DNI purchases from large enterprises, including carriers. Regolizio says, “We run into all sorts of situations. In some instances, network designers change their minds or don’t follow through on a project, and we end up with brand new or practically new switches and routers. On other occasions, we purchase legacy equipment, such as older Cisco Catalyst Supervisor Modules, because we know that there are enterprise customers with less sophisticated infrastructures who simply want to keep their networks up and running.”
While DNI sells equipment from Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net), Extreme Networks (www.extremenetworks.com), Foundry Networks (www.foundrynet.com), and other recognized network equipment manufacturers, 90% of its business comes from acquiring and reselling Cisco (www.cisco.com) network devices. The concentration in Cisco sales isn’t surprising. “Cisco has an 80% share of the enterprise switching market,” says Phil Hochmuth, a senior analyst at Yankee Group in Boston.
Regolizio says Cisco doesn’t especially like secondary equipment marketers such as DNI. “They see it as competition for new equipment, not as another way of keeping their products in the market,” he says. Compare the suggested prices for new Cisco equipment to the same used models from DNI, and you can understand why. According to Regolizio, Cisco prices a new WS-SUP720-3BXL supervisor card for the Catalyst 6500 and 7600 products at around $40,000. “We could probably offer the same thing used for 60% less,” Regolizio says.
But competition from the secondary market doesn’t exactly have Cisco all that worried. “The used market is a tiny portion; it’s just a blip on the screen for Cisco,” Hochmuth says. Still, Cisco is aware of competition from the secondary market, and the networking giant is beginning to take notice, according to Hochmuth. He says, “Cisco eventually could become its own largest competitor.”
Most of the equipment DNI receives is in very good condition. The company cleans each piece of equipment, brings the device back to its factory default configuration, tests it, and ships the product with new rack kits, power cords, and accessories. “We provide a test sheet to verify the equipment was working according to spec when we shipped it,” Regolizio says. “We serialize and track everything, too,” he adds. DNI also provides a one-year warranty on what it sells.
Regolizio says new products shipped from the factory in some cases may not be as reliable as good used equipment. “Most used equipment has gone through burn-in and proven itself on the job, whereas new merchandise may have been in a warehouse for a year,” Regolizio explains.
DNI also helps out resellers. “We do for resellers [what] they can’t do themselves,” Regolizio says. Systems integrators, for example, generally know exactly what they need by part number. DNI, Regolizio says, fulfills their requirements accordingly. But the difference for the reseller compared to the vendor selling new equipment is the reseller has the ability to make 30% through the secondary equipment market vs. only 5% on new equipment, and it can still pass on a significant savings to the end user.
Regolizio calls DNI “an interesting business,” noting that the business model “kind of flourishes in any condition. When times are good, customers are opening their wallets. In bad times, they may be forced to purchase secondary equipment. During bankruptcy or downsizing, there’s going to be an influx of equipment. I’ve been doing this for several years, and I can’t say there has been one season where it’s been bad.”
Prices in the secondary equipment market are moving targets, and keeping track of today’s price on a particular item requires vigilance and a knowledgeable network of buyers and sellers. The day-to-day work of right-pricing an item is perhaps DNI’s biggest business challenge. The processes DNI has in place to meet that challenge year in and year out is also a major reason for the company’s success.
Regolizio says, “We receive a stream of emails from other brokers trying to sell equipment.” The volume of requests to sell or purchase a certain type of equipment will cause a readjustment in price. DNI then has to communicate its current market prices to customers and sellers.
Yankee Group’s Hochmuth says, “Even as new networking technologies come along, there still are customers who don’t want cutting-edge [network equipment].” Another strategy some enterprises use, even those who buy new equipment for production, is purchasing and inventorying used equipment for spares, Hochmuth notes. The cost is low, and the extra devices are nearby when an existing unit fails.
Regolizio says secondary market items in demand that can be purchased new include the Cisco 7600-SIP-400 and Cisco 7206-VXR/NPE-G1 Router. And buyers still look for legacy products. He says the Cisco 3640 Router and WS-C2950-24 Catalyst Switch are popular secondary-market items.
Network Equipment: Current Or Legacy Models?
Cisco Systems Cisco 7206 VXR
The Cisco 7200 VXR routers are the multiservice members of the Cisco 7200 series routers. The Cisco 7200 VXR routers are designed to support gigabit capabilities and to improve data, voice, and video integration in both service provider and enterprise environments.
The Cisco 7200 VXR routers incorporate an integrated Multiservice Interchange (MIX) capability to support future voice applications. MIX interconnections on the midplane provide the ability to switch DS-0 time slots between multichannel T1 or E1 interfaces, much like a digital cross-connect or an add-drop multiplexer. This feature enables the Cisco 7200 VXR routers to switch DS-0 voice channels on a T1 or E1 interface from one voice processing port adapter to another voice processing port adapter.
It also enables DS-0s to be switched through the Cisco 7200 VXR routers without any processing, a requirement in certain voice configurations. The Cisco 7200 VXR routers support a high-speed network services engine (NSE) as well as the high-speed network processing engine.
The Cisco 7206VXR supports multiprotocol, multimedia routing and bridging with a wide variety of protocols and port adapter combinations available for 7200 series routers. In addition, the Cisco 7206VXR midplane provides increased support for multiple high-bandwidth port adapters.
Cisco Gateway GPRS Support Node
Key Benefits
By implementing Cisco GPRS products and related solutions, mobile operators can optimize their networks to deploy high-quality mobile voice and data services. They can also benefit from new operating efficiencies, peer-to-peer IP-based architecture for scalability, and IP standard interfaces to billing (prepaid and postpaid) and customer support. The Cisco GGSN, combined with its routing capability, offers the same level of quality, reliability, and scalability that has made Cisco a leader in the Internet and data networking industry. Moreover, the Cisco GGSN 3.0 on a Cisco 7206 VXR with the Cisco NPE 400 Network Processing Engine is supported by CiscoWorks for Mobile Wireless network management, which is equipped with fault management, access point name (APN) management, and configuration management for the Cisco GGSN. Mobile Wireless Network Architecture MapThe diagram below shows how the Cisco GPRS solution enables GSM operators to provide packet data service to their mobile subscribers.
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Intelligent Networks Direct Information Traffic
Equipment is designed to move traffic along the most efficient and best route The goal is to route traffic associated with different applications to the most appropriate destination and to preserve the unique qualities of a specific type of traffic. For example, voice traffic receives the priority it needs to maintain conversations, and Web queries are routed to a server that houses the necessary content to answer those queries. The collection represents 9,700 CDs of audio, video, still images, and text, and the museum is continually adding material to its archives, says Brian Beaumont, director at Experience Music Project. All of the museum's data resides on more than 200 servers, connected via more than 90,000 miles of fiber-optic and copper cabling in a packet-over-Sonet and Gigabit Ethernet LAN. The museum's main requirement is reliability, because its mission is to provide a complete multimedia experience to all visitors, whether in person or on the Web. "We've been mandated to give our visitors an unparalleled experience they can't get anywhere else," Beaumont says. Without network equipment that provides ample capacity and reliability, the museum wouldn't be able to support streaming video, for instance. Because the museum operates with a great deal of creativity, it needs a network that can accommodate constantly changing exhibits. "We're interested in being flexible and being able to turn on a dime," Beaumont says. For those reasons, Experience Music Project chose Black Diamond LAN switches from Extreme Networks Inc., which has the video-streaming capabilities the museum needs, and Cisco 7206 switch routers with Ethernet channels and packet-over-Sonet capabilities for the speedy infrastructure the museum's content requires. Part of the movement to more intelligent devices involves the addition of content awareness to routers and switches. The market for content-networking equipment, as it's known, was $1 billion last year and will surpass $1.7 billion this year, reaching $9.5 billion by 2005, according to International Data Corp. The market-research firm says content networking includes caching, Secure Sockets Layer acceleration, and Layer 4/7 switching, all of which require some level of content awareness and content-based processing. Layer 4/7 switching involves switching traffic at the upper, or more complex, levels of the Open Systems Interconnection model of computer-data networking. Higher-intelligence switches will start replacing core enterprise routers, especially as the content on business networks becomes more diverse and assumes higher importance to businesses, IDC says. Within the content-networking category, Crossbeam Systems Inc. is combining multiple network-processing tasks in a single piece of equipment rather than requiring customers to devote multiple servers to the tasks. The company's X40 network-applications processor combines network-processing modules, applications-processing modules, and a control module in a single chassis. Throop Wilder, VP of marketing at Crossbeam, says one X40 device can take the place of multiple firewall appliances and load balancers in a company's network, greatly simplifying the network infrastructure. "One of the things we've heard from customers is that they're tired of dealing with a plethora of different equipment platforms," Wilder says. All the major networking hardware vendors are building more intelligence into their products at the same time they're adding more robust processors to handle higher-speeds and support for increasingly sophisticated applications that combine voice, data, and video. In intelligent switching, the goal is "to do the switching based on the context of the message," says Don Petersen, chairman and CEO of Avaya Inc. Demand for intelligent switching led to Avaya's recent purchase of Cyber IQ, Petersen says. Avaya will incorporate Cyber IQ's content-aware switching technologies into its Cajun line of Gigabit Ethernet switches within a matter of months, he says. Other areas on which Avaya is concentrating include Gigabit Ethernet switching and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, Petersen says. In September, the vendor launched 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards that customers can add to Avaya's 580 and 880 switches. Avaya also is continuing to enhance its line of Definity IP PBX systems to support larger-scale installations, he says. Nortel Networks Corp. in October created its Intelligent Internet business unit focused strictly on adding intelligence to its Passport line of switches. So far, the unit has integrated content-aware switching capabilities from Nortel's acquisition of Alteon WebSystems to build capabilities such as load balancing and SSL acceleration into the Passport product line. The addition of higher levels of intelligence to network switches helps businesses handle increasingly complex applications, but it carries dividends for carriers as well. Especially as voice and data begin to converge on a common, packet-based network infrastructure, the addition of application-based intelligence to equipment that resides within carrier networks serves as the foundation for new value-added services such as network-based voice messaging or virtual private networks. The more-intelligent equipment can also reduce carriers' costs because it carries traffic more efficiently, says Kris Alexander, a product strategist at Genuity Inc., operator of one of the biggest Internet backbone networks. Genuity is working with Nortel and Cisco Systems to add voice-over-IP and content-based switching to Genuity's network, Alexander says. With the new switches, Genuity plans to offer enhanced security, additional service-level guarantees, and network-based voice-processing services, among other services, Alexander says. Another vendor, Alcatel, is focused on providing converged voice and data products to the business marketplace, says Ray Hanson, VP of strategy at Alcatel's E-business networking division. Availability, security, intelligence, and manageability are four requirements that the company says are essential for products that combine voice and data traffic on a single network, Hanson says. Alcatel's main voice-over-IP product is its Omni PCX 4400 client-server IP voice system, which the company is renaming the Omni PCX Enterprise. As with any IP telephony system, the Omni PCX has to have the intelligence needed to prioritize voice traffic, Hanson says. By early next year, Alcatel plans to introduce 1Touch, a quality-of-service feature for its products that will let network managers quickly assign the correct priorities to different types of network traffic based on the characteristics of different applications. That capability, like others that add intelligent switching and greater content awareness to networking equipment, gives customers more immediate control over how their traffic is routed on a network based on its traffic type or application.
The days of unintelligent switches and routers may be numbered, as customers replace relatively unsophisticated equipment in their networks with devices capable of applying more intelligence to network traffic. Along with more intelligence, the latest equipment also provides the higher speeds needed to accommodate greater network loads created by new multimedia applications such as streaming audio and video.
Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2
Along with the Cisco usual features the Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 is equipped with a few unique quality. The device is capable of transferring data up to 100Mbps. This ensures you of a very fast data sharing. Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 also contains a 128MB RAM memory installed and could reach up to 512MB SDRAM. The device also contains a 48MB flash memory installed and could reach up to 128MB if upgraded. Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 also contains a 1xMIPS RM7000A 350 MHz processor. The device only has a dimension of 42.7 cm in width and 13.3 cm in height, 43.2 cm in depth with a weight of 22.7 kg. The device comes in a rack-mountable design. Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 have an Ethernet and Fast Ethernet data link protocol. It also contains a high-duplex and full-duplex communication mode. Also the Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 have a status indicator which allows the users to know the link activity, power and 100M device connected. The device is able to produce a processing speed of up to 2 million packets per second; with port and service adapters of NxDSO to Gigabit Ethernet. The NPE-G2 is an additional feature to increase the device performance. The NPE-G2 increases the routers processing capacity and enables the newest Cisco IOS software features. Only have a 280 watt of power requirement. The device also contains 6 expansion slots with 4 free spaces, 1 for its memory and 2 slots for its PC card. Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 networking standard is IEEE 802.1Q, with the networking features like flow control, full duplex capability, layer 2 switching and auto-sensing per device. It also supports DHCP, VPN, BOOTP, ARP, MPLS, VLAN and IPv6 for the users networking needs. Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2 like all other Cisco made gadgets is very reasonably priced. The device is all worth it up to the last penny you spend for it. With all its unique features and user friendly manual, this makes it one of the leading routers for multiple service providers. This ensures your user a high internet speed with little or no interruptions. This gadget is one of a must buy for all the service providers out there, for users are pleased with the Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2. Cisco is indeed able to meet the consumers demand for speed and high quality products.
Just meet the need for improvement and to reach the consumer’s desire Cisco products just keep on improving. One example is the Cisco 7206 VXR with NPE-G2, included in the Cisco line of high quality router which provides users with the internet speed they desired. And has been known for all Cisco products, it is very user friendly and contains a guaranteed product replacement if anything should go wrong upon installing the product. There is also an online documentation available which basically provides the user all the information they need. The documentation also contains some usual problems that may arise coupled with the easy solution.
USED CISCO 7206VXR or UBR7206VXR Router
The Cisco uBR7206VXR features:
The six-slot Cisco 7206VXR
The four-slot 7204VXR
The Cisco 7200 series delivers exceptional price/performance to meet the requirements of both enterprise and service providers. With its combination of scalable performance, density, and low per-port pricing, the Cisco 7200 allows network-layer capabilities to be extended to a wide range of network configurations and environments.
One of the key benefits of the Cisco 7200 series is modularity - facilitating performance upgrades as well as investment protection. Each configured Cisco 7200 system includes a chassis, processor, Input/Output (I/O) controller, memory, power supply(s), and IOS software. The Cisco 7200 product line offers a variety of processors, I/O controllers, and memory options in order to offer customers a "customized" configuration to meet their network needs.
The Cisco 7200VXR chassis includes a 1-Gbps midplane, which uses two independent 32-bit, 50 MHz, 1.6Gbps PCI buses. The midplane also includes a Multiservice Interchange (MIX) that supports switching of DS0 time slots via interconnects across the midplane to each adapter slot. In addition, the VXR chassis supports the reliability features of dual power supplies and Online Insertion and Removal (OIR) of port adapters.
For network connectivity, the Cisco 7200 Series uses the same port adapters as the Cisco 7500 Versatile Interface Processor (VIP), thus protecting customer investment in interfaces and simplifying sparing. The Cisco 7200 Series offers scalable density with a wide range of interfaces. These interfaces include:
Ethernet
Fast Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet
Token Ring
IBM
Synchronous Serial
High Speed Serial Interface (HSSI)
ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI)
Clear-channel and multi-channel T1/E1
Clear-channel and multi-channel T3/E3
ATM
DPT
Packet over SONET (POS)
Voice
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