Hi, Well depending on your "black box", your millage will vary. Their wide use of ASIC eliminate a lot of the headache of pure software implementation. Buffer, timing, expected results, etc. Their "real" sofware only represent a small part of the device and is mostly relegated to management and some L4 to L7 handling. So yes, ASIC/FPGA devices have "software" their result and behavior are predictable and the system is more stable because of it. PS: Yes, CAM lockout, bad RAM is still a pita for them. In short: It is quite a thing to say that because everything can be categorized as "software" that someone point is invalid. ----- Alain Hebert ahebert@pubnix.net PubNIX Inc. 50 boul. St-Charles P.O. Box 26770 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 6G7 Tel: 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net Fax: 514-990-9443 On 07/09/12 07:42, gb10hkzo-nanog@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

Steve at pirk,

I fail to grasp the concept in your argument.

You do realise, do you not, that your $$$$$ black boxes from your favourite brand name vendor have software running inside of them do you not ?

Case in point for example, the recent LINX issues.... it wasn't the hardware that gave them the headaches, but the software running on it sure did !

...

I am a big believer in using hardware to load balance data centers, and not leave it up to software in the data center which might fail.