On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:44:56PM -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Your average PC doesn't have to be NEBS-compliant, doesn't have to work more than 24 hours w/o crashing, and doesn't have quite strict constraints on power & heat dissipation. It doesn't have to have redundant power, and its components are readily available and cheap (those are produced in _large_ batches).
I'm going to poke Vadim a bit. :-) If you're building a multi-bay router (a la a number of new designs) why not use a bay for the general purpose functions? Specifically something like a sun E10000, or HP v-class (to illustrate top of the line but off the shelf) connected into the fabric? Why even try to build the processing on a board (with all the power and heat constraints) for a system that large (say 16 bays)? Of course, this doesn't work too well if you have to take a full bay for a "routing engine" for a quarter rack forwarding chassis, so the approch doesn't work on the smaller side, but that said there are lots of N-Way servers available. Bottom line, why doesn't a router vendor partner with a host builder, and let them do what they do best (build a host), while the router vendor does what they do best (build forwarding hardware)? I guess you could argue Juniper did this, although I find it hard to consider it a partnership when one side is free software. For the record, big, multi-rack but "single management" routers make me nervous. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org