Stephen -- having a benefit of being on all sides of the industry, I can only say that I share Alex's opinion that the industry is thoroughly corrupted and polluted with tons of snake oilish "breakthroughs" in the routing/switching/transport technology and displacement of sound design practices with "marketectures". And, the fact remains, OFRV _is_ the major contributor to that orgy of lies and ridiculously exaggregated claims. Those of us who have better memories remember quite well whose marketroids started to use sum of inbound and outbound interface speeds (and, later, "fabric capacity") to advertise their product's performance. Basically, Alex's advice to network administrators is quite sound, and follows the time-worn adage: Keep It Simple, Stupid. As for vendors, any person with a modicum of common sense would take any claims of any newfound magic squeezing more than few percent of useful capacity from the same old pipes with at least a cup of salt. Especially when those claims are made by people who want to sell more of their overpriced boxes. --vadim On Sun, 27 Apr 2003, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Your personal anti-vendor crusade is adding much more heat than light to this thread. There are many technical approaches which may be valid depending on business factors; to claim any approach but yours is financial suicide is incredibly naive, not to mention provably wrong.