On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 05:03:28PM -0500, John A. Tamplin wrote:
Why not considering the 4th vendor, Cabletron, for this kind of equipment, before using PCs.
PCs are cheap and I know them well. I wasn't aware Cabletron even had a box with a BGP-4 implementation in it.
PCs are also designed with a mindset that saving $.10 on a component saves millions, encouraging overly cheap designs. Considering the typical PC customer has no problem with rebooting their machine several times a day, that gives them plenty of room to cut corners without pissing off their primary client base. This is not to say that you can't build solid hardware, but the typical PC vendors simply do not have a level of quality sufficient for 24x7 operation.
I'll speak to that. He didn't say precisely what I think he meant, so I'll say it: it's not all that hard to build PC-class equipment for mission critical standards. A vast majority of the voice mail/automated attendant systems out there nowadays are "PC" gear... which does _not_ mean J. Random Compaq... IMS, WTI and half a dozen other vendors sell gear that ought to be perfectly rugged enough for this, and remember: if the gear costs a tenth what it's commercial competition costs, your redundancy is a hot spare in the next rack, and move a couple cables.
"Cheap" often winds up "expensive" when you count the cost of downtime. We run all Cisco routers and have had exactly one failure on any box in 4 years (a power supply in a 4500). While the software quality has gotten worse lately and you have to be careful selecting which code to run, the software has generally been as stable as the hardware.
Can you get the source from Cisco? ;-)
As far as I know, Cabletron's router blades for their switches are just Cisco 4500's with one of the NPM slots tied to the backplane. I assume you could run BGP on it, although performance might not be good enough.
There was a buyout?
John Tamplin Traveller Information Services
Damn, sorry; didn't even look. If you take anything I said too harshly, change your mind. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com