On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Stephen Balbach wrote:
What's an IP switch? If you can define what this is other than a marketing stunt, I'd appreciate it.
Routes the first packets and switches the rest based on "flows". It is not dependent on layer 2 or PVC's to determain the correct route? This is what Ive read from the mfg's who claim higher pps via this method then straight routing.
Not really. Given the nature of traffic in Internet, the "cost" of flow set up and maintenance pretty much outweigh whatever gain you get from from cut-through switching. This is actually quite similiar to why forwarding caches in routers aren't very useful in the current Internet. Now, if the device had specific functions that requires it to perform actions on per-flow bases on a traffic that was deterministically long flow oriented, it would be a gain, but this sort of thing is not very useful for the Internet as we have it.
Since people seem to think that switch has some magically theraputic quality to network performance I wonder why Bay marketing hasn't started making a big deal about the fact that their BCNs function as frame relay switches.
I assume at some level it makes sense to do switching for topology reasons. But for performance, it is not a benefit?
Depends. -dorian