On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Rubens Kuhl Jr. wrote:
Why do you think 6500/7600 doesn't have the required performance ? 30 Mpps Sup 2 with fabric-enabled line-cards can perform incredibly well... Having FlexWAN and other non-fabric line-cards will slow down to 15 Mpps, which is usually enough. VLAN L3 interfaces are required only on CatOS (which is today required by POS modules, unfortunately), but not on Supervisor IOS.
Those are advertised numbers, best-case assuming flows that can be distributed away from the MSFC. My experience with Cisco in the past is they rarely get close to advertised numbers, YMMV. Not that even 30Mpps (15Gb/s) is adequate for a GigE aggregation device, and 15Mpps (7Gb/s) is not enough. Even then, other vendors are advertising on the order of 50-90Mpps in the same size chassises, and at least in my lab they are achieving that. For the same price or less than 6500, lots less than 7600. And larger chassises are avaiable doing on the order of 150Mpps. In my experience, service providers that are doing lots of L3 GigE are not using 6500's or other Cisco products, at least for GigE services. 6500 is still strong in the L2 GigE space. With 10GigE, Cisco is even less appealing. SONET is a different story, of course. Pete.