[41110] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: What is the limit? (was RE: multi-homing fixes)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Wed Aug 29 19:31:36 2001
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 19:30:45 -0400
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <20010829193045.A45735@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
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In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10108291347110.19248-100000@arch.exigengroup.com>; from avg@exigengroup.com on Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:44:56PM -0700
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On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:44:56PM -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> Your average PC doesn't have to be NEBS-compliant, doesn't have to work
> more than 24 hours w/o crashing, and doesn't have quite strict constraints
> on power & heat dissipation. It doesn't have to have redundant power, and
> its components are readily available and cheap (those are produced in
> _large_ batches).
I'm going to poke Vadim a bit. :-)
If you're building a multi-bay router (a la a number of new designs)
why not use a bay for the general purpose functions? Specifically
something like a sun E10000, or HP v-class (to illustrate top of
the line but off the shelf) connected into the fabric? Why even try
to build the processing on a board (with all the power and heat
constraints) for a system that large (say 16 bays)?
Of course, this doesn't work too well if you have to take a full bay
for a "routing engine" for a quarter rack forwarding chassis, so the
approch doesn't work on the smaller side, but that said there are
lots of N-Way servers available.
Bottom line, why doesn't a router vendor partner with a host builder,
and let them do what they do best (build a host), while the router
vendor does what they do best (build forwarding hardware)? I guess
you could argue Juniper did this, although I find it hard to consider
it a partnership when one side is free software.
For the record, big, multi-rack but "single management" routers make
me nervous.
--
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org
Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
