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i'm not stating that the value is only at the edge. i'm stating that i don't think it is realistic to be sticking transparent devices that hold detailed state information on flows in the core.

Inktomi's CTO has publicly stated that this is their objective, although the phrase used was "super aggregation nodes" and not "core". If you're interested, ask him for his 3W3 paper submission wrt handling 100 Gbs links.

I have seen Paul Gauthier's paper. Last time I spoke with Paul & Vince (VP Field Ops) when I was out in the bay area, that is precisely what we discussed, among other things. Sure, they can theoretically scale to those types of links. Their suggestion is to use policy based routing (PBR) instead of Alteon (or similiar L2/L4 technology) and the reliance of an Ethernet being avaiable for drop in of their technology. Anyone who knows anything about PBR knows that PBR is neither fault tolerant nor scalable nor something I want to be force to use for this type of stuff. Anyone who knows anything about technologies like WCCP knows that it is more than just plain PBR, because state is maintained in the L3 switching engine. The Alteon does maintain state of its cache farm memebers, but not of the sessions themselves. Other major issues (aside from their problematic network deployment strategy) that I see around Inktomi are in the current platform choice. It is neither cost effective nor does it make sense from a performance standpoint. I have discussed these with numerous people at Inktomi over the past months and not gotten a solution.

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there is enormous value in the core: some people get it right, some get it horribly wrong. but lets face it - the core of a networks primary function is to move packets fast, and move them well.

Violently agree with this.

Ditto. You need to do much more than just push packets fast. You need to be able to distinguish services on the network, perhaps on a per flow basis, and make sure your mission critical services or high end customers don't get trampled on. You need to be able to push packets fast _and_ do better than just plain best effort. You need to be able to do this fault tolerant and/or highly available. Cheers, Chris -- Christian Kuhtz, BellSouth Corp., Sr. Network Architect <ck@bellsouth.net> 1100 Ashwood Parkway, Atlanta, GA 30338 <ck@gnu.org>