[127745] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Vyatta as a BRAS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Senie)
Tue Jul 13 11:22:30 2010
From: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
In-Reply-To: <B041E921-4550-4ED7-9A49-5DE4C2D93D46@oicr.on.ca>
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:22:18 -0400
To: Greg Whynott <Greg.Whynott@oicr.on.ca>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Jul 13, 2010, at 11:11 AM, Greg Whynott wrote:
>>>=20
>>=20
>> They are all software based, no matter who builds them. Cisco IOS,=20=
>> Juniper JunOS, etc.
>=20
> controlling hardware asic's and fpga's. =20
Which are in essence software burned into chips. They can provide some =
acceleration, but will the next faster set of multicore CPUs and related =
chipsets be faster? This back-and-forth has happened repeatedly over the =
decades. Even in NIC cards, where there were early cards that offloaded =
processing from the main computer, but on the next newer main CPU, these =
"accelerated" cards were now the bottleneck and processing moved back to =
the host. So it is with routers, ASICs and the like.
You should buy a solution because it meets your needs. You should not =
care about the presence or absence of programmed logic vs. one or more =
CPUs. You should care about throughput capabilities, latency, packets =
per second, performance of filtering rules, etc. If the results can be =
obtained with off the shelf parts and at a fraction of the cost, why do =
you care whether it was built by someone with a big budget to spin =
ASICs, or by a company using software in fast, off-the-shelf hardware?
Many Cisco products do not have ASICs or FPGAs, but are quite capable as =
routers. I expect that's true of all the vendors.=
