Re: is there a market for this?

[Jeremiah Kristal <jeremiah () corp idt net>]

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Chris Wilson wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
> > I have a friend who's in the high speed optoelectronics biz and
> > already does lots of OC-[N] equipment, and I mentioned to him that I
> > thought that there was probably a market for PCI cards that spoke IP
> > over OC-3/OC-12. Before I strongly encourage him to do this, I was
> > curious as to whether anyone else felt there was a real market for
> > such things.
>
> I was (somewhat) following a dicussion about high speed communications
> handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level
> serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to
> reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus, so I think trying to
> push an OC-# connection over it might be pushing it a bit ;)
>
> Chris

Actually, I've seen a PCI-based box doing 15MByte/sec sustained read/write
to disk, so it is possible to do it, but it's not likely to be standard
for quite a while.  I certainly think that an OC-12 card would be overkill
though.  I'm also wondering why someone who can afford an OC-x would be
trying to save a couple bucks by using a PCI-based router.  
Once you get into this type of bandwidth, I think a bus becomes a serious
chokepoint.


      ________
      \______/                  Jeremiah Kristal  
       \____/                   Network Engineer      
        \__/                    IDT Internet Services
         \/                     jeremiah () hq idt net