Chris Grundemann wrote:
Greg has laid out a great bit of information and I would like to add just one possibility to the list of budget 10GE routers: Vyatta. According to a recent press release from that company (http://www.vyatta.com/about/pressreleases.php?id=51) they offer a product that is "2 to 3X higher performance at a cost savings of more than 75 percent" when compared to Cisco's 7200. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to test or use the Vyatta routers yet; I have however successfully used other open-source Linux based routers in the past with great success. If you are looking for a truly budget 10GE router, they may be worth adding to the list and looking into.
Whether you can actually do 10Gb/s reasonably on a linux or freebsd soft-switched router platform is going to depend a lot on your actual pps rate. 800K pps which is 10Gb/s / 1500 bytes is feasible, but 19M pps which is 10Gb/s / 64 bytes is not. Susceptibility to dos traffic at relatively low bit, but high pps rates is a general issue with soft-switched platforms. and needs to be accounted for in model deployments.
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Greg VILLAIN <nanog@grrrrreg.net <mailto:nanog@grrrrreg.net>> wrote:
On Mar 24, 2008, at 10:23 AM, user user wrote: > > Hi everybody! > > I find myself in the market for some 10GE routers. As > I don't buy these everyday, I was wondering if any of > you guys had any good resources for evaluating > different vendors and models. I'm mainly thinking > about non-vendor resources as the vendorspeak sites > are not that hard to find. > > Also I'd love to hear recommendatios for "budget" 10GE > routers. The "budget" router would be used to hook up > client networks through one 10GE interface and connect > to different transit providers through two 10GE > interfaces. > > - Zed
Hiya,
When it comes to budget, force10 are good. I wouldn't be able to confirm if they're worth performance-wise. I'd strongly suggest Foundry, I'm a big fan of their kits, price-wise and performance-wise, provided you do not need rocket-science features. MLX/XMR models will surely do the trick perfectly.
When it comes to router purchasing habits, we all tend to get religious... Bottom line is that most of the 'regular' vendors (namely Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, Force10, Extreme, Riverstone) implement pretty much the same set of features, which are all IETF/IEEE normalized, meaning if you don't need proprietary features (and you'll wish you don't), any router will be fine, the only difference will come from: - the chassis being non-blocking or not (i.e. backplane design) - the price per port - the operating OS - the feeling you'll get with the salesperson, and the reputation of their Support Teams. - vendor specific features such as Flow Sampling To make it simple, most vendors have an IOS like OS, except Juniper which has a really clever and elegant OS, but are very pricey. Foundry and Force10 have the cheapest price per port Cisco does only Netflow, Foundry & Force10 only SFlow (which is a true standard) and I think Juniper does JFlow Cisco's kits are packed with proprietary protocols (HSRP and GLBP instead of VRRP, their own ethernet trunking, EIGRP as their own and yet extremely efficient IGP, TCL scriptable CLI...) , some of them are really good, some are crappy, but I suggest you'd stick with IEEE/IETF protocol to avoid future trouble.
One thing: RSTP/802-1w is very (very, very, very) not often interoperable between vendors who all have their own interpretation of the norm and can quickly turn into a nightmare. I'd strongly suggest try&buys if (R)STP interoperability is required, but I'm a little paranoid :)
Greg VILLAIN Independant Network & Telco Architecture Consultant
-- "Those who do not create the future they want must endure the future they get." ~Draper L. Kaufman, Jr. --