On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Scott Michel wrote:
On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, RJ Atkinson wrote:
Anyone out there have any Cisco GigE operational experience? I've got a customer who's evaluating GigE to 100 switched Ethernet, and they want a homogeneous vendor network (I don't know why, I just help them write the trade study...) So far, there's a huge question about Cisco GigE to 100 switched performance and I was wondering if anyone's willing to cough up numbers.
What sort of numbers are you after ?
Well, given the customer, often the numbers their looking for are pretty nebulous and often not as well defined as anyone'd like, but getting a customer's requirements are usually that way to begin with.
Basically, they want to be all Cisco, contemplating GiGE fiber for their backbone, with switched 100 to the desktop. The numbers they're interested in are number of sustainable 100 ports to GigE port. With a 45Gbs backbone quoted for the Cisco box, that would appear to be pretty limited.
Although, if there are numbers for other non-Cisco vendors, they'd be helpful ammo as well.
Published and "what I'm really operating and seeing" would be really useful. This particular customer has a number of applications where they could easily have multiple ports running pretty close to 40-80 Mbs in distributed applications.
Thanks for the question. Hope this narrows things down a little.
It doesn't. I think you are highly confused. Layer 2 (switching) GigE is (relatively speaking) easy, Layer 3 (routing) is much harder. Within the basic limitations of understanding your port density and backplane capacity (because 9999 time out of 10000 you don't need real line rate on all ports to all ports, but you do need port density), if you can't do line rate layer 2 you need to take that switch and throw it in the garbage. I don't know where you got the number of 45Gbps, but if you really want that kind of line rate performance check out the Foundry products, which can do 32, 64, and 120 gige ports on the 4000, 8000, and 15000 respectively. I highly doubt this is what you need at all, and if this customer was really doing this kind of traffic they would know what they needed to begin with. I don't know where you got 45Gbps from, but if they're just interested in being "All Cisco", call Cisco and I'm sure they'll sell you what you need. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/humble PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)