On Fri, 15 May 2009 22:20:28 EDT, David Storandt said:
- Vyatta was proposed as an alternative system, probably best architected out of the mainstream traffic flows (no hardware forwarding), say a BGP route reflector or GBE edge router, similar argument to a 7200/G[1|2]. I can't say I'm familiar with the software, but the cost savings of premium x86/x64 hardware and 8x PCI-x serving a few 10GBE interfaces + built-in GBEs is intriguing, especially paired against our budget and relative Cisco costs. A spec'd out 1U Dell box with dual power, 8x cores, 4GB, RAID1 SATA, and 2x 10GBE XFP+2x GBE built-in came in under $7k with CPU headroom to burn.
Did you check PCI bus bandwidth? That's probably going to be the biggest constraint on "a few 10GBE interfaces" if they all get going full blast. Remember that each packet is going to burn bandwidth twice - once in and once out...