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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Core router bakeoff?
On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 05:03:28PM -0500, John A. Tamplin wrote: > > > Why not considering the 4th vendor, Cabletron, for this kind of equipment, > > > before using PCs. > > > > PCs are cheap and I know them well. I wasn't aware Cabletron even had > > a box with a BGP-4 implementation in it. > > PCs are also designed with a mindset that saving $.10 on a component saves > millions, encouraging overly cheap designs. Considering the typical PC > customer has no problem with rebooting their machine several times a day, > that gives them plenty of room to cut corners without pissing off their > primary client base. This is not to say that you can't build solid hardware, > but the typical PC vendors simply do not have a level of quality sufficient > for 24x7 operation. I'll speak to that. He didn't say precisely what I think he meant, so I'll say it: it's not all that hard to build PC-class equipment for mission critical standards. A vast majority of the voice mail/automated attendant systems out there nowadays are "PC" gear... which does _not_ mean J. Random Compaq... IMS, WTI and half a dozen other vendors sell gear that ought to be perfectly rugged enough for this, and remember: if the gear costs a tenth what it's commercial competition costs, your redundancy is a hot spare in the next rack, and move a couple cables. > "Cheap" often winds up "expensive" when you count the cost of downtime. We > run all Cisco routers and have had exactly one failure on any box in 4 years > (a power supply in a 4500). While the software quality has gotten worse > lately and you have to be careful selecting which code to run, the software > has generally been as stable as the hardware. Can you get the source from Cisco? ;-) > As far as I know, Cabletron's router blades for their switches are just > Cisco 4500's with one of the NPM slots tied to the backplane. I assume you > could run BGP on it, although performance might not be good enough. There was a buyout? > John Tamplin Traveller Information Services Damn, sorry; didn't even look. If you take anything I said too harshly, change your mind. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [email protected] Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com
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