RE: You are right [was Re: Ungodly packet loss rates]

[David Whipple <dwhipple () microsoft com>]

Jeremy,

I would have to strongly disagree with you on many of your points below:

First I have had experience running a 200 router network, made fully of 
Bay BCN/BNX's.  This network was running OSPF, with several areas, and
route aggregation.  When the network was first implemented, we had some
problems, however Bay was quick to resolve them.  

In addition, I have seen several case of Bay routers BGP peering, with
Cisco's.  This is a fairly straight forward thing to do (now), and Bay
could
probably give you a white paper describing any potential differences
they
have with Cisco. 

As for not supporting SNMP, that is simply crap, I have written SNMP
code to pull many thousand entry route tables, and while this did have
performance implications, most routers have performance implications 
when doing lot's of SNMP. I would throw away site manager (Bay's 
SNMP Manager), and learn the MIB if I had a large Bay network.

Yes I would agree you have to have a good understanding of the MIB.
But, I would add that with a Cisco you have to have a good understanding
of IOS.

Generally, I think Cisco has a stronger software platform, Bay a
stronger
hardware platform, but both are viable options, depending on your 
environment.  Could you be running some 5.xx series code?

Haven't we beat this Bay/Cisco thing to death yet...

Thanks.
David Whipple.


> ----------
> From:  Mr. Jeremy Hall[SMTP:jhall () rex isdn net]
> Sent:  Tuesday, October 29, 1996 3:39 AM
> To:    alex () relcom eu net
> Cc:    nanog () merit edu
> Subject:       Re: You are right [was Re: Ungodly packet loss rates]
>
> well if you're going to compare ciscos and bay networks routers, consider 
> that Bay networks supports Rip, OSPF, BGP, and EGP. They do *NOT* 
> support communities in their production software, and they have *NO* 
> intentions of *EVER* supporting confederations. In adition, to handle 
> subnets, where you want the thing to summarise a subnet into a classful 
> route, the Bay's solution is to drop the route entirely. They also don't 
> seem to understand how to aggregate routes. Their solution there is also 
> to drop the route. They do not appear to have the option to announce the 
> aggregate with the routes. They also do not appear to have the option of 
> aggregating since the option they provide does not work. Their SNMP 
> agent only works on a few platforms, and in order to adequately solve a 
> routing problem, you need to have a *GOOD* understanding of the MIB. The 
> last time I enabled syslog on the box, the router reloaded several times 
> within a 5 hour period, causing instability in our small network, small 
> meaning under 200 routes.  I have fought with these things for 3 years 
> now and haven't seen much improvements. They have been promising NTP 
> support for quite some time now, since their routers don't have a 
> battery-powered clock.  Maybe the reason they can switch packets faster 
> and more reliably than ciscos is because they are unable to be placed in 
> a situation to really test their skills. The items I have shown here 
> make it VERRY difficult to allow one of these things to perform with 
> full routing because you cannot determine what it will do.
> -- 
>              -------------------------------------------
>              | Jeremy Hall      Network Engineer |
>              | ISDN-Net, Inc    Office +1-615-371-1625 |
>              | Nashville, TN    and the southeast USA  |
>              | jhall () isdn net   Pager  +1-615-702-0750 |
>              -------------------------------------------
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