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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Links on the blink - what will/should mci & sprint do?
| Can a 7500 being fed a single routing view switch IP packts among 6 OC3 AIP | cards running point-to-point AIP-AIP OC3 links to other 7500s at reasonable | speeds, one wonders. If you change "Can" to "Will", this is unclear right now. What apparently is clear (at least to me) after much beating up of the 7500 series beta boxes we got to play with in ICM land and the 7500 series software in the Cisco test lab, is that SprintLink's plan to use 7500s in the four new cities (Atlanta, Kansas City, Cheyenne and Seattle) that will be on-line imminently is reasonable. Firstly the 7500s, even without the smarter technology cards in development by Cisco will currently handle the load requirements of those cities. Secondly since everything currently is done in the RSPs, we have opportunities to try quick and experimental changes to the IOS software at very low-levels that don't exist with the 7000+SSP (but presumably if the proofs-of-concept work really well we can get a port done). Thirdly, there are some very cunning ideas being proposed by various hardware people for making the 7500 do interesting things on the switching front that very probably will get the router to deal with the kinds of loads you're asking about. Finally, the key advantage of the 7500 is the much better ports-per-dollar and ports-per-rack numbers over the 7000s using current technology, and even better numbers as Cisco rolls out the type of channelizing hardware we have been asking for. Specific performance questions wrt the Cisco 7500 series should probably be asked through your favourite Cisco information channels. I'm pretty sure everyone's going to find out how well 7500s work in practice, backbone-wise, Real Soon Now. The big risk, naturally, is that the platform just doesn't hold up in practice, which would force us to do a redesign along the lines of what Gordon has been asking about. Frankly, though, I'm not too worried. Many very smart people have put alot of work into making sure the 7500 doesn't become a complete corporate embarassment for Cisco. Sean.
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