Re: Routers vs. PC's for routing - was list problems?

[Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>]

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 05:47:40PM -0400, David Charlap wrote:
> 64/66 PCI has 4 times as much bandwidth - about 4Gbit/s.  Much better
> than standard PCI, but hard to find on a PC-compatible motherboard, and
> expensive when you do find it.  Enough bandwidth for 10 line-rate 100M
> Ethernet ports or six line-rate OC-3 ports (in theory, anyway).  But not
> really enough for anything faster (OC-12 or GigE) if you want line-rate
> forwarding.

Why is this such a hard concept for people to grasp? If you just need to 
bat around a couple hundred Mbit, a PC based router could work beautifully 
for you. If you want to design a scalable but efficient system, you use 
dedicated hardware for the forwarding plane, cheap but powerful PC 
hardware for the control plane, and an ASIC to look at bytes in the header 
and come up with a destination interface. But Juniper has done this, so 
move on.

I wish they would put a little more legitimacy on the Olive though, it 
could be a very useful product. Everything from very small guys who only 
need to move 100Mbit but who need more stability and policy power than a 
linsux box and zebra can provide, to the very big guys who could build a 
very beefy 2GHz box for computationally intensive tasks (like a route 
reflector).

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)