Re: Core router bakeoff?

["Jay R. Ashworth" <jra () scfn thpl lib fl us>]

On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 05:03:28PM -0500, John A. Tamplin wrote:
> > > Why not considering the 4th vendor, Cabletron, for this kind of equipment,
> > > before using PCs.
> >
> > PCs are cheap and I know them well. I wasn't aware Cabletron even had
> > a box with a BGP-4 implementation in it.
>
> PCs are also designed with a mindset that saving $.10 on a component saves
> millions, encouraging overly cheap designs.  Considering the typical PC
> customer has no problem with rebooting their machine several times a day,
> that gives them plenty of room to cut corners without pissing off their
> primary client base.  This is not to say that you can't build solid hardware,
> but the typical PC vendors simply do not have a level of quality sufficient
> for 24x7 operation.

I'll speak to that.  He didn't say precisely what I think he meant, so
I'll say it: it's not all that hard to build PC-class equipment for
mission critical standards.  A vast majority of the voice
mail/automated attendant systems out there nowadays are "PC" gear...
which does _not_ mean J. Random Compaq...

IMS, WTI and half a dozen other vendors sell gear that ought to be
perfectly rugged enough for this, and remember: if the gear costs a
tenth what it's commercial competition costs, your redundancy is a hot
spare in the next rack, and move a couple cables.

> "Cheap" often winds up "expensive" when you count the cost of downtime.  We
> run all Cisco routers and have had exactly one failure on any box in 4 years
> (a power supply in a 4500).  While the software quality has gotten worse
> lately and you have to be careful selecting which code to run, the software
> has generally been as stable as the hardware.

Can you get the source from Cisco?  ;-)

> As far as I know, Cabletron's router blades for their switches are just
> Cisco 4500's with one of the NPM slots tied to the backplane.  I assume you
> could run BGP on it, although performance might not be good enough.

There was a buyout?

> John Tamplin                                  Traveller Information Services

Damn, sorry; didn't even look.  If you take anything I said too
harshly, change your mind.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra () baylink com
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