AGIS had about 40 of them in the last I knew. http://www.agis.net/press25.html. I know from experience that there are some quirks to gated, but as far as power goes the GRF munches Ciscos. Ciscos are much easier to work with though. One big down point on the GRF's imho is that in order to change anything with them you have to run a gdcreconfig, which stops and starts gated, effectively taking down the routing for a period of time, whereas you can add/remove a static route from a cisco and not bring down the routing. GRF's also take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, which can be annoying. On the other hand it's quite easy to manage users and such with the GRF's , as they are BSD based. Setting up authentication like Radius and SecurID is quite simple as well. Then there are the advantages of being able to use tools like nslookup and whois without having to open a shell somewhere. Very nice while troubleshooting. So, as with any product comparison there are pros and cons to both. I think that Cisco's are great, as I'm not a Unix/GateD guru, but I think that the Ascends have a bit more power to them and will be able to better handle the growing routing table. Just my 2 cents. --Damon
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We are in the development phase of engineering the deployment of approximately 60 POPs throughout the US. Our 'standard' configuration is normally based upon cisco equipment and more often than not consists of a 7513 connected to a Catalyst 5000/5500 via FDDI with the various internal LAN segments switched from there via FD 100BaseTX.
We've begun to explore the viability of deploying the GRF for several reasons, not the least of which is cost and performance. Given (and taken with a grain of salt) the apparent performance differential between the cisco 7513 and the Ascend GRF (the GRF outperforms the 7513 substantially in our tests,) my concerns are more operations-related.
The GRF DOES support the 'full' implementation (including extensions) of BGP4 and the other 'vanilla' TCP services that you'd come to expect from a router (er, layer 3 switch?) of this caliber. Since it's NOT a cisco, we'd have to deviate and not utilize EIGRP as our IGP of choice, and deploy OSPF which poses its own set of issues.
SO, the bottom line...has anyone else deployed multiple GRF400's with success. Ascend will tell you that UUNET has deployed (or is going to) a hundred or so. I want to talk to people USING the technology, not thinking about it.
Your comments and opinions are welcomed.
TIA,
Christofer Hoff
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,,, (o-o) ------.oOO--(_)--OOo.--------------------------------- Christofer L. Hoff \ No true genius is Chief Nerd, \ possible without a NodeWarrior Networks, Inc \ little intelligent \ madness! hoff@nodewarrior.net \ http://www.nodewarrior.net \ -Peter Uberoth "Nuthin' but Net!" \ ------------------------------------------------------ 310.568.1700 vox - 310.568.4766 fax
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