Ali vs. Frazier, Hearns vs. Leonard, Liddell vs. Silva, and Rousey vs. Holm were, for various reasons, fights of epic proportions. Unlike those fights, the slugfest between VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI will continue for years to come. Here’s a look at the contenders’ vital stats:

* Gartner estimates

Smack talk

“The Cisco sales rep walks in and says ‘I’m going to sell you a switch.’ When they call me, I don’t have anything to sell, because I don’t sell switches. On the other hand, if I walk in and say, ‘I have a network virtualization solution running in the hypervisor, particularly vSphere, and it provides fully distributed firewall and all of these other services,’ Cisco doesn’t have anything.”
— Martin Casado, senior vice president, network and security, VMware

“What they [VMware] should do is figure out how to be cooperative in an open way, not in a proprietary way by locking down their APIs like they’re doing today. That’s done with multiprotocol BGP leveraging EVPN for VXLAN. We would be happy to work with VMware in that area.”
— Frank D’Agostino, CTO, Insieme Business Unit, Cisco