North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Force10 Gear - Opinions

  • From: Jo Rhett
  • Date: Thu Sep 11 03:40:14 2008
On Sep 5, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Paul Wall wrote:
Jo Rhett wrote:
Note the "not random" comment. People love to use the random feature of ixia/etc but it rarely displays
actual performance in a production network. 

Once upon a time, vendors released products which relied on CPU-based
"flow" setup.  Certain vintages of Cisco, Extreme, Foundry,
Riverstone, etc come to mind.  These could forward at "line rate"
under normal conditions. Sufficient randomization on the sources
and/or destinations (DDoS, Windows worm, portscans, ...) and they'd
die a spectacular death.  Nowadays, this is less of a concern, as the
... 
Either way, I think it's a good test metric.  I'd be interested in
hearing of why you think that's not the case.  Back on topic, doing a

Yes. And those problems were fixed in most gear. What I found *also* was that the flow tables tended to fill up, and a lot of gear thrashes on the flow tables. You need real bi-directional sessions to create the effect properly in many cases. (ie Extreme, which handles random fine but bidirectional flows proved that too much of the work was being done in software)

I have a current spreadsheet here, and trust me your math went wrong
somewhere. A completely full chassis is only a bit more than what you are
...
But no, I'm not going to redo the math. I'm not a F10 salesperson and I
have much more important things to do right now. 

I'd be interested in seeing where I went "wrong", in the interest of
setting the record straight.  The original poster was interested in
how Force 10 stacks up against the competition from a feature and
price prospective.  He deserves some cold science, and I'm trying to
help him out.

I meant what I said, and I wasn't trying to be rude. There are F10 people on this mailing list, it would serve you to engage them instead of me. I'm quite happy with my Force10 units but I'm not making any commission selling them and I have too much to do to be doing someone else's job.

To wit, you said F10 is cheaper than a comparable Cisco 6500 (in a
basic gig-e configuration).  I demonstrated that's not the case.  You
responded with ad-hominem attacks, followed by indifference, and
later, claims of emotional distress; still you refuse to provide any
hard numbers, claiming it's "not your job".  Where I come from, people
like that are referred to as sore losers. :)


You're reading a lot more into it than I bothered to think about it. I've done the math repeatedly, and Force10 always comes out cheaper than Cisco in that scale of port density. Your numbers looked off to me, but letting you know the previous sentence is about all the time I can spend on this topic. Can we kill this now? Thanks.

--
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness