On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 11:10:32PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:
I don't understand how you can differentiate between a router and an L3 switch. In my view "L3 switch" is a marketing term. All high end boxes do hardware based IP forwarding, whether their ancestry is from the L2 or the L3 side.
To me something that uses hardware assist, setup by the cpu per destination, is an L3 Switch. Something that does equal route lookups per packet all the time is a router.
So a 7500 with a fast cache is a L3 switch? :) The closest definition you'll get to an L3 switch is a box which does primarily or only Ethernet, can easily become an L2 ethernet switch again with different software, and uses software hacks on a normal ethernet CAM to do forwarding lookups. Other than that, it's just generalizations and stereotypes. Oh and of course, marketing. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)