Re: 10GE router resource

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>]

Chris Grundemann wrote:
> Greg has laid out a great bit of information and I would like to add 
> just one possibility to the list of budget 10GE routers: Vyatta.  
> According to a recent press release from that company 
> (http://www.vyatta.com/about/pressreleases.php?id=51) they offer a 
> product that is "2 to 3X higher performance at a cost savings of more 
> than 75 percent" when compared to Cisco's 7200.  Unfortunately I have 
> not had the opportunity to test or use the Vyatta routers yet; I have 
> however successfully used other open-source Linux based routers in the 
> past with great success.  If  you are looking for a truly budget 10GE 
> router, they may be worth adding to the list and looking into.

Whether you can actually do 10Gb/s reasonably on a linux or freebsd 
soft-switched router platform is going to depend a lot on your actual 
pps rate.

800K pps which is 10Gb/s / 1500 bytes is feasible, but 19M pps which is 
10Gb/s / 64 bytes is not.

Susceptibility to dos traffic at relatively low bit, but high pps rates 
is a general issue with soft-switched platforms. and needs to be 
accounted for in model deployments.

> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Greg VILLAIN <nanog () grrrrreg net 
> <mailto:nanog () grrrrreg net>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Mar 24, 2008, at 10:23 AM, user user wrote:
>      >
>      > Hi everybody!
>      >
>      > I find myself in the market for some 10GE routers. As
>      > I don't buy these everyday, I was wondering if any of
>      > you guys had any good resources for evaluating
>      > different vendors and models. I'm mainly thinking
>      > about non-vendor resources as the vendorspeak sites
>      > are not that hard to find.
>      >
>      > Also I'd love to hear recommendatios for "budget" 10GE
>      > routers. The "budget" router would be used to hook up
>      > client networks through one 10GE interface and connect
>      > to different transit providers through two 10GE
>      > interfaces.
>      >
>      > - Zed
>
>     Hiya,
>
>     When it comes to budget, force10 are good. I wouldn't be able to
>     confirm if they're worth performance-wise.
>     I'd strongly suggest Foundry, I'm a big fan of their kits, price-wise
>     and performance-wise, provided you do not need rocket-science features.
>     MLX/XMR models will surely do the trick perfectly.
>
>     When it comes to router purchasing habits, we all tend to get
>     religious...
>     Bottom line is that most of the 'regular' vendors (namely Cisco,
>     Juniper, Foundry, Force10, Extreme, Riverstone) implement pretty much
>     the same set of features, which are all IETF/IEEE normalized, meaning
>     if you don't need proprietary features (and you'll wish you don't),
>     any router will be fine, the only difference will come from:
>     - the chassis being non-blocking or not (i.e. backplane design)
>     - the price per port
>     - the operating OS
>     - the feeling you'll get with the salesperson, and the reputation of
>     their Support Teams.
>     - vendor specific features such as Flow Sampling
>     To make it simple, most vendors have an IOS like OS, except Juniper
>     which has a really clever and elegant OS, but are very pricey.
>     Foundry and Force10 have the cheapest price per port
>     Cisco does only Netflow, Foundry & Force10 only SFlow (which is a true
>     standard) and I think Juniper does JFlow
>     Cisco's kits are packed with proprietary protocols (HSRP and GLBP
>     instead of VRRP, their own ethernet trunking, EIGRP as their own and
>     yet extremely efficient IGP, TCL scriptable CLI...) , some of them are
>     really good, some are crappy, but I suggest you'd stick with IEEE/IETF
>     protocol to avoid future trouble.
>
>     One thing: RSTP/802-1w is very (very, very, very) not often
>     interoperable between vendors who all have their own interpretation of
>     the norm and can quickly turn into a nightmare.
>     I'd strongly suggest try&buys if (R)STP interoperability is required,
>     but I'm a little paranoid :)
>
>     Greg VILLAIN
>     Independant Network & Telco Architecture Consultant
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> "Those who do not create the future they want must endure the future 
> they get."
> ~Draper L. Kaufman, Jr.
> --