[48026] in North American Network Operators' Group
Cisco 7200 VXR with NPE-400 (was RE: The market must be coming back)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary)
Tue May 21 01:13:35 2002
From: "Gary" <garyb@foundrynet.com>
To: "Adam Rothschild" <asr@asr.org>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 14:12:25 +0900
Message-ID: <MFEFJDOOAHPPMHFAFMPEOEGBDDAA.garyb@foundrynet.com>
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Adam:
> [...] Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's
> > 10% throughput... Why waste the money, just buy FE!).
>
> How did the Foundry test lab arrive at those figures, and what
> substances were consumed at the time?
I used a Cisco 7200 VXR with NPE-400. I used two different 7200's with the
exact same results. Bidirectional throughput on 1GbE is a fraction above
10%. Unidirectional is a bit better (23%). Singl line ACL drops it to 8%
(permit ip any any). FE performance doesn't start to drop below line rate
until you put more than two in the box. I have a powerpoint if you'd like
it, but it is not meant to slander Cisco, just to convince my customers NOT
to put GbE in a 7200! It is not a GbE platform!
> I'd say 300+ mbit/sec on a PA-GE is a more accurate real-world limit,
> assuming you've got plenty of spare CPU cycles to burn, and no ACL's.
>
> Besides, that's really an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think
> anyone, including Cisco, has ever made the claim that it can do line
> rate GbE; that's not to say it isn't useful for certain topologies
> requiring slightly-faster-than-fast-e router<->switch uplinks, etc.
My powerpoint compares the 7200 with the FastIron 4802 Premium. It is line
rate with less than 7 us latency on the two GbE ports. I tested this
myself. I can forward this to you if you like. It is a bunch of SmartApps
screen captures of the testing.
I really like the 7200 VXR. It is a good 10M and minimum FE platform. It
can switch DS0 on the midplane and it supports a wide array of interfaces!
I just don't like to see it oversubsribed. Many of our customers use the
7200 and have nothing bad to say about it when deployed properly.
Gary
