Jo Rhett wrote:
Note the "not random" comment. People love to use the random feature of ixia/etc but it rarely displays actual performance in a production network.
Once upon a time, vendors released products which relied on CPU-based "flow" setup. Certain vintages of Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, Riverstone, etc come to mind. These could forward at "line rate" under normal conditions. Sufficient randomization on the sources and/or destinations (DDoS, Windows worm, portscans, ...) and they'd die a spectacular death. Nowadays, this is less of a concern, as the higher-end boxes can program a full routing table (and then some) worth of prefixes in CAM. Either way, I think it's a good test metric. I'd be interested in hearing of why you think that's not the case. Back on topic, doing a couple of gigs of traffic at line rate is a walk in the park for any modern product billed as a "layer 3 switch". The differentiator between, say, a Dell and a Cisco, is in the software and profoundly not the forwarding performance. Jo Rhett wrote:
No, $65000.00 vs $62240.00.
I have a current spreadsheet here, and trust me your math went wrong somewhere. A completely full chassis is only a bit more than what you are quoting (at list) and the chassis itself is practically free.
But no, I'm not going to redo the math. I'm not a F10 salesperson and I have much more important things to do right now.
I'd be interested in seeing where I went "wrong", in the interest of setting the record straight. The original poster was interested in how Force 10 stacks up against the competition from a feature and price prospective. He deserves some cold science, and I'm trying to help him out. To wit, you said F10 is cheaper than a comparable Cisco 6500 (in a basic gig-e configuration). I demonstrated that's not the case. You responded with ad-hominem attacks, followed by indifference, and later, claims of emotional distress; still you refuse to provide any hard numbers, claiming it's "not your job". Where I come from, people like that are referred to as sore losers. :) Drive Slow, Paul Wall