"Perry E. Metzger" writes:

PCI is 33mhz at 32bits = about a gigabit per second.

For those that are busy telling me in private mail that PCI is only 133Mbytes per second, please note BITS versus BYTES. OC-3 = 155Mbit (or about 20MBytes/sec if you like) PCI = 1.xGBit (or about 133MBytes/sec) I am well aware that OC-12 is faster than PCI, but it isn't faster than the fast 64 bit PCI stuff, which clocks in at 533MBytes/second, or something on the order of 4.25 Gbit/sec. (Yes, I know my math is somewhat off, but I don't have a calculator -- thats approximating off the top of my head). Anyway, PCI is more than fast enough for OC-3 stuff. Perry

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

PCI is 33mhz at 32bits = about a gigabit per second. Fast PCI is 66mhz, and a fast 64bit PCI standard is coming, which yields 4Gbps across the bus. Now, admittedly, you can't get that fully -- but if you claim you can't get a mere 45mbps across the bus per second you are doing something desperately wrong and stupid, like making the main CPU deal with *way* too much of the work. Of course, most serial communications companies ARE doing things desperately wrong and stupid, but that another story...

I'm not sure how the person who was discussing it on the other list was doing it.. maybe they were talking about ISA ;) In any case, I'd be pretty fearful of running OC-level bandwidth over a PC... "Gee, the corporate network went down because the router's hard drive crashed!" Chris Chris Wilson (CW40) | http://www.atlantic.net Internet Connect Company | Dial-up access * Web hosting Sales: 800-422-2936 Support: 800-921-9328 | Leased lines * News services

On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Neil J. McRae wrote:

Uhh, then you'd have backups, I know of several largish networks using PC's as routers, I personally have put in a PC router topology and never had a single hard disk failure, the drives are not very active, only really at boot time, and another point is that whilst doing this I never had the problems that a lot of ISP's with Cisco routers where having...

We ran PC routers in our network for a few years. I had one at MAE-East and MAE-West. I at one point had around 20 in my network, and never had a hardware problem. We started using Cisco 4000s, but with a vary limited amount of RAM they did not last long. We then looked at upgrading to the 4500, and also at the 7000. The cost was to much for us at the time. Our problem was we needed more RAM and processor for BGP, but did not need DS3 speed bandwidth. The PC routers work great, but we eventually needed DS3 and we found that it just would not work well a PC. We now use the GRF, it was vary easy for us to make that move, all our gated configs were just copied over. With the GRF we have the same type of look and feal of our PC routers, but we now can do OC12. Nathan Stratton President, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16

On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Nathan Stratton wrote:

We ran PC routers in our network for a few years. I had one at MAE-East and MAE-West. I at one point had around 20 in my network, and never had a hardware problem. We started using Cisco 4000s, but with a vary limited amount of RAM they did not last long. We then looked at upgrading to the 4500, and also at the 7000. The cost was to much for us at the time. Our problem was we needed more RAM and processor for BGP, but did not need DS3 speed bandwidth. The PC routers work great, but we eventually needed DS3 and we found that it just would not work well a PC.

We now use the GRF, it was vary easy for us to make that move, all our gated configs were just copied over. With the GRF we have the same type of look and feal of our PC routers, but we now can do OC12.

Funny that you would say how great PC based routers are and then in the next paragraph state that you've had to move away from them to the GRF. The GRF is a PC based router (P-166 running BSDI and an optimized GATEd). The GRF's strength is not it's routing, it's still a PC router, it's strength comes from combining a good switch, alot of buffer space, and the use of an route engine that is familar. It will be very interesting to see a production Cisco 12000 to compare performance on PC vs dedicated when an IP switch is in use. Tim Gibson

Chris Wilson writes:

In any case, I'd be pretty fearful of running OC-level bandwidth over a PC... "Gee, the corporate network went down because the router's hard drive crashed!"

I'd be far more fearful of being able to say "the corporate network went down because *THE* router died." If your network is mission critical, having a "THE" router isn't the right thing -- you need redundancy. (I must say that I'm frequently upset when large network providers tell me on the phone "sorry you are having trouble, THE router in Oshkosh went down...) As for the other implication, although I personally don't run or intend to run networks using normal unix boxes as routers (and BTW, PCI bus covers Power-PC hardware, Alphas and soon Suns, too!), I know of organizations like Demon in the U.K. that run almost exclusively this way and seem to like it a lot. I actually was envisioning applications other than backbone routing for PCI Packet-Over-OC-[N] cards, but thats another story... Perry

Check out www.sdlcomm.com, I believe they have a HSSI card for a PCI bis At 03:47 PM 7/23/97 +0100, Andrew Bangs wrote:

Perry E. Metzger wrote:

...

As for the other implication, although I personally don't run or intend to run networks using normal unix boxes as routers (and BTW, PCI bus covers Power-PC hardware, Alphas and soon Suns, too!), I know of organizations like Demon in the U.K. that run almost exclusively this way and seem to like it a lot.

UK and Netherlands :-)

They seem to work well as routers with ethernet, fast ethernet and fddi, and we make quite a bit of use of the ZNYX multi-port ethernet cards where we need higher port density.

We ended up buying a non-PC router when we wanted a HSSI connection somewhere. Has anyone found a nice HSSI-PCI card that has support in any of the BSD-a-likes ?

Regards, Andrew -- Andrew Bangs, Network Engineering Team Leader, Demon Internet Ltd andrewb@demon.net http://www.demon.net/ http://www.demon.nl/

Nathan Stratton wrote (regarding an sdlcomm hssi/pci card):

We tested this card, you dont want it in your network.

Is the operative word here *yet* or did you observe a fundamental limit/flaw in the architecture of this card? Upon checking the web page it does seem like this card is pretty early in its life cycle. Ken Leland waiting for my rev-replacement 7206 hssi card at Monmouth Internet

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Chris Wilson wrote:

handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus, so I think trying to push an OC-# connection over it might be pushing it a bit ;)

This is not true. PCI bus bandwidth budget modulo overhead is about 400 MBps. There maybe architectural limitations of some PC motherboards that could cause the above, but PCI bus by itself can do OC3 just fine. After all, we've been able to generate full line rate level of traffic on a dual P166 with a fast ethernet card. When you have need more than a single port, you may run into problems at OCN rates, however. -dorian

Check out www.vbns.net page on the OC-3 monitor. OC3 over PCI. -scott At 06:02 PM 7/21/97 -0400, Chris Wilson wrote:

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

...

I have a friend who's in the high speed optoelectronics biz and already does lots of OC-[N] equipment, and I mentioned to him that I thought that there was probably a market for PCI cards that spoke IP over OC-3/OC-12. Before I strongly encourage him to do this, I was curious as to whether anyone else felt there was a real market for such things.

I was (somewhat) following a dicussion about high speed communications handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus, so I think trying to push an OC-# connection over it might be pushing it a bit ;)

Chris

Chris Wilson (CW40) | http://www.atlantic.net Internet Connect Company | Dial-up access * Web hosting Sales: 800-422-2936 Support: 800-921-9328 | Leased lines * News services