North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Force10 Gear - Opinions

  • From: Owen DeLong
  • Date: Tue Aug 26 12:47:07 2008
Standard benchmarketing. Not that I blame Cisco or EANTC for that, since they were debunking some benchmarketing done by Force10 and Tolly, but consider the source (and follow the money) when reading any "independent" test and what that means for accuracy.

80% of the EANTC report can be summed up as "The default CAM profile didn't do what we wanted, and we didn't bother asking Force10 for the commands to make it work." There are indeed some interesting product weaknesses, like any vendor has, but the fact that Force10's CAM can be partitioned to match the buyer's needs, rather than having a fixed configuration that all customers are forced to use, is an advantage in my book.

Having delved a bit deeper into F10's "partitioning" scheme, actually, it's not as flexible as one might hope.
There are a very small number of relatively large pages and you have to partition on page boundaries
which leaves you with only limited flexibility when it comes to the CAM partitioning.

Bottom line, in a few years, everyone carrying full tables with F10 gear will probably need to
upgrade all of their line cards to quad-cam.

Another thing to note (as near as I can tell, this applies to all vendors). All line cards will function
only at the lowest common denominator line card CAM level.

IOW, if you have single, dual, and quad-cam cards in your F10 chassis, they'll all act like
single-CAM cards.

Owen