Image from crystalinks.com
Do you recall the bygone component audiophile days? If this was before your time, here’s the concept:
Audiophiles* would spend days, weeks, months or even years creating their dream audio systems. They didn’t do this by purchasing an all-in-one receiver containing a preamp, FM tuner, AM tuner, and an integrated amplifier. No, the audiophile would lovingly and painstakingly select and assemble each and every component in their audio chain. They might choose a McIntosh amplifier, a Marantz preamplifier, a Crown tuner, and a pair of Klipsch speakers. Notice how no single manufacturer has been selected for more than one component? This was by intent and design. The rule seemed to be that there could be only one component piece from any one manufacturer. Think of this as an All Star team with only one player chosen from any one team.
Business network devices used to be that way. If you wanted a router perhaps you selected Cisco. Need a firewall, then buy a CheckPoint. Looking for a load balancer, try F5. Just like the audiophile’s component stereo system, you selected “best of breed” from many different vendors. Best of breed was built on the assumption that no single manufacturer could be the best at everything that they made or sold. Stick with one vendor for everything and you were bound to settle for second or third best in something.
Things today are different, but not necessarily better. Today we are seeing many more of the all-in-one network devices that claim to do it all except take out your garbage. The shift began, in part, when Cisco realized that it couldn’t be best in everything. So they bought companies that they believed to be the best, or one of the best in their field. Different companies and their product lines began to be absorbed into the great Cisco monolith and quickly became Cisco branded products.
This shift was certainly not limited to Cisco, but theirs is perhaps the classic example of this phenomenon. Not unlike a house of cards, application on top of application, service on top of service, layer on top of layer began being built into routers that were previously considered to be, well, just “routers.”
Cisco’s Integrated Services Router (ISR) represents perhaps the classic example. Want a router? Sure, the ISR can handle that. Need a voice gateway that can do call processing, voice mail, automated attendant, and audio conferencing? No problem. Looking for a device to run Linux open source packages? The ISR can do that as well. The question is how well can it handle these multiple and varied tasks and at what risk factor.
It goes the other way as well. Servers that were previously servers only, now have code and NICs that allow them to function as routers. Vyatta, among others, offers just such a device. So routers are servers and servers are routers. The lines get more and more blurred all the time.
True, the all-in-one box concept does have its advantages. There is the potential for less finger pointing because one vendor (Cisco or Vyatta in this case) supports all the functions. There is a potential for energy and space savings as one device can now do the work that multiple devices performed in the past. You have less purchase orders to sign, and fewer devices to manage in your network. But not all is nirvana with such an all-in-one approach. Your network now has one whopping single point of failure. Should your magic box suffer a major failure, its services and applications will all come crashing down like a house of cards. Plus you lose best of breed. Now, you have to settle for whatever comes in the all-in-one box.
Is it really possible to built a solid routing/switching/management platform and then toss into the brew unified communications, layer seven applications, and a plethora of security services. Can this be done and still have a single box that does all these things well? Perhaps, but I leave this determination up to your judgment. I would only hearken back to the bygone days of component stereo where an all-in-one solution was never acceptable to the audio purist. True, you can still buy component audio devices today just as you can still buy separate network components. But the one box that does it all is becoming more common. Perhaps the bygone days of component stereo have become "bygone" for a reason.
*(Wikipedia definition: An audiophile…is a hobbyist, identified by their love for music, or use of high-end audio electronics)
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