North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Cisco Cache Engine

  • From: Paul A Vixie
  • Date: Thu Nov 27 14:31:36 1997

> Has anyone tried out the Cisco Cache Engine ? Has anyone stress tested it ?

I'd like to.  But I can't afford one.  If someone wants to commission a third
party analysis and will loan me the hardware, I'd love to stress test the CD.

> Can it handle the load of about 100 Mbps of International Web traffic to be
> cached and 50 000 users ?

Its specs say yes.  My gut feeling is "no".  We've built such a machine and
are selling it as a product, and now that I know how much harder transparent
caching is than we thought when we FCS'd back in February, I'm betting that
your users will complain if you put the choke point that far upstream.  It's
not a question of whether a 75xx and an array of cache engines can do that
many transactions per second (I really have no idea whether it can), but
rather, a question of path symmetry in robust networks of that size.

> We will test it early next year on a private Internet network, however I
> was told that there were some hardware issues about to be solved ?

That's what I heard, too.  (Cisco is the only other entrant into the trans-
parent caching market, so we watch them pretty closely and listen to what our
customers say about their Cisco testing experiences.)  Cisco has been taking
orders but not shipping for the last month or two.  While the official story
is about a hardware glitch, I think it's a lot more likely that they ran into
the same basic architectural faults that we hit last Spring.  Hopefully they
will be faster at fixing them than we were.

(See http://www.mirror-image.com/ for more details about our product.)

Note that a technical discussion of transparent caching on this list would
probably be no more welcome than a discussion of DNS politics.  If you want to
discuss this further, subscribe to the Squid list (see http://www.nlanr.net/).
I answered this message publically because I wanted a chance to tell y'all
about my box -- if anyone follows up with detailed questions or comments I'll
answer them privately or not at all, I'm already on the thin edge of Randy's
irritibility envelope with just the message you're now reading.