North American Network Operators Group
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Re: is there a market for this?

  • From: Perry E. Metzger
  • Date: Tue Jul 22 09:50:07 1997 
Chris Wilson writes:
> In any case, I'd be pretty fearful of running OC-level bandwidth
> over a PC... "Gee, the corporate network went down because the
> router's hard drive crashed!"

I'd be far more fearful of being able to say "the corporate network
went down because *THE* router died."  If your network is mission
critical, having a "THE" router isn't the right thing -- you need
redundancy. (I must say that I'm frequently upset when large network
providers tell me on the phone "sorry you are having trouble, THE
router in Oshkosh went down...)

As for the other implication, although I personally don't run or
intend to run networks using normal unix boxes as routers (and BTW,
PCI bus covers Power-PC hardware, Alphas and soon Suns, too!), I know of
organizations like Demon in the U.K. that run almost exclusively this
way and seem to like it a lot.

I actually was envisioning applications other than backbone routing
for PCI Packet-Over-OC-[N] cards, but thats another story...

Perry