re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its RoutersOnly Cisco, Let's see... Juniper MX960. True 960G. No it is 480G - Oh but that's none redundant. Only 440G Redundant. It should be called the MX880. So you are correct Cisco double counts, just Juniper double counts plus throws a few more in for good measure. ALU was the only real player that didn't double count.
BTW, yes that is 1T over the switch fabric. Sorry to disappoint.
As for LR. They were more then fair. They even gave Juniper the credit for in house developed hardware for the MX. Unless Juniper purchased EZchip and it's network processor, the statement "Juniper designed its own chips for the MX" is very graciously.
re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its Routers"The FP2 can handle 100 Gbit/s of traffic (using the double-counting that's conventional for routers). With 10 slots in the 7750 SR-12, the largest system of the family, that adds up to what could be called 1 Tbit/s of capacity." Well, firstly, double counting is not really conventional for all routers but for Made in Cisco. And when calculating aggregate throughput one need not to forget about the backplane. Upgrading NPU is nice and cool but wouldn't that move the bottleneck to the backplane? Or LR eats from AlcaLu palms and repeats numbers that can not be achieved in real-life networks (1T calculated without any significant number of flows crossing the backplane).
re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its RoutersOnly Cisco, Let's see... Juniper's MX960. True 960G. No it is 480G - Oh but that's non-redundant. Only 440G Redundant. It should be called the MX880. So you are correct Cisco double counts, just Juniper double counts plus throws a few more in for good measure. ALU was the only real player that didn't double count.
As for LR. They were more then fair. They even gave Juniper the credit for in-house developed hardware for the MX. Unless Juniper purchased EZchip and it's network processor, the statement "Juniper designed its own chips for the MX" is very gracious.
BTW, yes that is 1T over the switch fabric. Sorry to disappoint.
You said that ALU caught up with JNPR. You aren't implying that JNPR has a 40G or 50G clear channel NPU. I thought their ASIC (is it an NPU) was 10G and they had multiple of them on a board to achieve a max of 40G.
Also, the number you published for cisco's QuantumFlow is 20 mpps. Is that 64 byte packets or 1500 byte packets? At 64 bytes, that's roughly 10G. At 1500, it's 240G. I'm guessing it's either i-mix or 64 byte so it would be either 10G or 40G.
That would be better characterized as catching up on capacity, but leapfrogging on capability, at least vs. JNPR, considering the 10G NPU from ALU is 5 years old?
You mention that the performance drops from 20 mpps to 2 mpps. I searched the archives for any other info you might have published on this and I didn't find any.
Now, I'm all for this kind of real performance numbers but what did you have to turn on to make a 10x performance degradation? Not IPv6 or ACLs, I presume. DPI? IPSEC?
I presume the convoluted reporting of Basil's statement can be deciphered to mean ALU said their numbers don't degrade. Was that a like for like comparison?
re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its RoutersIn fact the ballyhooed Cisco QuatumFlow processor relies on commercial silicon design from Tensilica, while as mentioned on another post Juniper used EZ-chip. So ALU has no match really.
Another interesting design competition would be on router OS design. ALU managed to evolve their feature set using one OS only. That's hardly jumping a bandwagon because that feat is unmatched as well.
re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its Routers"BTW, yes that is 1T over the switch fabric. Sorry to disappoint." Disappoint? Not at all. I just prefer straight and quite simple throughput calculation to marketing talk. BTW. 1Tb switch fabric would not sustain 1Tb of ports at line rates. Even for unicast without any multicast. Been there, done that.
re: AlcaLu Beefs Up Its RoutersDesi -- The 20 vs 2 mpps comes from Cisco's own data sheets. You get down to 2 mpps if you turn on "all baseline services combined and encryption enabled" or "numerous services and firewall enablement combined." (Quoting from the data sheet.)
I don't have a like-for-like comparison of the numbers but will try to pin something down. I agree it would be enlightening.
Lucent and cisco has the best chipset design capability,
can anyone guess, what's going to happen with the startups? are they any room for the startups to do anything posh?