[103360] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 10GE router resource
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lamar Owen)
Wed Mar 26 13:18:24 2008
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:19:35 -0400
From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <18f601940803251913t280bf39ehd527ca69fe1ee3b9@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Tuesday 25 March 2008, Aaron Glenn wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Patrick Clochesy <patrick@chegg.com> wrote:
> > Very interesting study I had not seen, and a bummer. That really puts a
> > cramp in my advocation of our CARP+pf load balancers/firewalls/gateways.
> > Than again, what's a PIX box capable of?
> I'd rather tweak a whitebox than pay through the nose for a PIX.
But aren't PIXen whiteboxes internally? I know the PIX-like LocalDirector
that was donated to us makes a very nice nBox deployment for us.
Lots of these sorts of boxes are internally whiteboxes (I'm using that term
loosely to mean an Intel-based box that could potentially run something like
a Linux or *BSD). The second-hand Content Engine 565 I got on eBay that had
a fried power supply was just a Cisco-labeled IBM eServer xSeries 305, and
was loaded with WindowsXP when I got it. It's running CentOS 5 now, with a
new IBM power supply in the box. The two earlier Content Engines and two
even earlier Cache Engines I got second-hand are likewise custom Intel
hardware; PIII 800's, to be precise. Now, they DO use ECC RAM, which most
whiteboxes won't have. But otherwise they are customized whiteboxes, and
you're paying for the software and support.
But cisco is not alone in this. Nomadix gateways, to use one example, are
built on custom embedded x86 systems.
What I'm waiting on is someone to take a system like a Xilinx ML410 dev board
and use the FPGA to do hardware-accelerated forwarding/filtering. See
http://www.lynuxworks.com/board-support/xilinx/ml410.php for info on the
board.
As to PIXen performance, see the charts in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_PIX
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
