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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: The market must be coming back
Jason, Are you espousing Juniper or Foundry for 10ge? -----Original Message----- From: Jason LeBlanc [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:35 PM To: Gary; Christopher J. Wolff Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: The market must be coming back Juniper. Sorry I'm a fan, they've done a lot right. Cisco is ~$35k per port of 10ge, and unless you get a 6513 you can't get many interfaces. This makes 10ge in a real network (where everything needs to be redundant, multiple interfaces, etc) a bit impossible on the Catalyst platform. If your needs are but a few interfaces, maybe it works. Cisco is woefully behind here. The SUP2/SFM method of doing things is a patch at best to boot. Foundry is cheaper and a bit ahead in many aspects, granted there are SW issues still looming, but the 'life of a packet' as a packet is handled by a Foundry switch makes a lot more sense. Foundry ASIC's are rockin, as are Juniper's, Cisco seems to be lost here. I think the ASIC designers ran off to Foundry and Juniper. ;) If only Juniper made 'switches', such that density were higher, cost per port were lower and they were more applicable to switching (L2/STP, etc) and LAN specific needs. Additionally, anyone have thoughts on the Unisphere purchase by Juniper? I think it should scare the bejesus out of Cisco. Always interested in the opinions of the brightest, let the flames begin. ;) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Gary Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:15 PM To: Christopher J. Wolff Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: The market must be coming back Chris: > I've been thinking about leasing some dark fiber and running one of > the new 10gigE blades for the Cat 6500 chassis. Be careful here. Last I tested (at one of our channels that also resells Cisco) is that the 10GbE on the Catalyst 6500 hasn't broken 4G throughput yet. Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's 10% throughput... Why waste the money, just buy FE!). The GSR is up to about 8G throughput nowadays from what I've seen. Foundry Networks (my company) can get a perfect clean 8G throughput on all of our chassis with management modules M2 or above (we don't support 10GbE on the legacy M1). Our NG chassis will be available later in the year for those folks that want 4 X 10 GbE on each module (8 slot chassis). I expect this will be a perfect 40G throughput since I've never seen us do anything less than perfect (been working here since August). Additionally, you would be the first customer I've heard about doing standards based 10GbE on a Catalyst. (feel free to chime in if you're doing this... Can I bring my SmartBits 600 to your site to test throughput?). Good luck! Foundry has a few references: Deployed: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_3_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_2_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr2_11_02.html Many others that we don't press release. We've got these blades running in production networks here in Japan that I'm not allowed to talk about. Also many other places. Deploying: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr5_8_02.html Performance: http://www.spirentcom.com/news/press.cfm?id=87 > Throw in the Cisco "Flamethrower" GBIC and I should be good for 50 > miles. Has anyone tried > this? Foundry Network's Long Haul (LHB: 150 km, LHA: 70 km) Ethernet optics exceed Cisco's on GbE (ZX: 100 km). I'm sure we exceed them on the ER LAN PHY for 10GbE. We've only tested to 85 kilometers (ER). 802.3ae standard is 40 km: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020508/nyw068_1.html Cisco's website says they can do the 802.3ae standard 40 km on the 1550 nm blade. I'm not sure if the optics are changeable either: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ifaa/6500ggml/ I doubt if there is a GBIC for 10GbE available. We use the same blade with changeable optics; however, I would not call the SR (300 meters), LR (10 km), and ER LAN PHY optics GBIC's... Moral of this story is that BEFORE you buy these blades from Cisco (or anybody), test them! If you don't have 10GbE SmartBits or IXIA, you can use 1GbE interfaces and wrap them around until you get 8G (no need to produced anything higher 'cause the Cat 6500 has an 8G throughput limitation). Don't test latency with this method :-). I don't believe the marketing from any company, not even my own. I test, then tell. I've personally never seen a packet drop at a steady 8G rate for up to 72 hours; however, one of our customers evaluating the 10GbE blades reported 2 64 byte packet's were dropped in a 12 hour line rate test. I suspect they had bad fiber. Gary Blankenship Systems Engineer Foundry Networks |