On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Chris Wilson wrote:
On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I have a friend who's in the high speed optoelectronics biz and already does lots of OC-[N] equipment, and I mentioned to him that I thought that there was probably a market for PCI cards that spoke IP over OC-3/OC-12. Before I strongly encourage him to do this, I was curious as to whether anyone else felt there was a real market for such things.
I was (somewhat) following a dicussion about high speed communications handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus, so I think trying to push an OC-# connection over it might be pushing it a bit ;)
Chris
Actually, I've seen a PCI-based box doing 15MByte/sec sustained read/write to disk, so it is possible to do it, but it's not likely to be standard for quite a while. I certainly think that an OC-12 card would be overkill though. I'm also wondering why someone who can afford an OC-x would be trying to save a couple bucks by using a PCI-based router. Once you get into this type of bandwidth, I think a bus becomes a serious chokepoint. ________ \______/ Jeremiah Kristal \____/ Network Engineer \__/ IDT Internet Services \/ jeremiah@hq.idt.net