Ascend GRF400
Peter Galbavy
peter at wonderland.org
Fri Apr 25 08:27:59 UTC 1997
On Thursday, April 24, 1997 6:36 PM, Deepak Jain [SMTP:deepak at jain.com]
wrote:
> (I do not know if this is true, but it is a guess). That the Netstar
> product did the ATM routing extremely well. I believe that was its
> market originally.. All of the other cards, the ether, the new T1 line
> cards (hah-hah) maybe even the HSSI cards are all new since Ascend took
> them over, to broaden their market.
As an almost customer of Netstar, and a long time one from Ascend, I have
watched the product get integrated into what it is today. The original
point of these boxes was HIPPI. HIPPI over WAN. Hmm. Well, "I have no
supercomputers", as they say - so I waited for other cards. When Netstar
was acquired I remember that the cards available were HIPPI, HSSI, FDDI and
ATM. Ethernet was on the way (100Mb was talked about, then switchable down
to 10Mb) by end of 1996.
The interesting products now are the IP/SONET OC3c card and the OC12 card
that should turn up one day.
The attraction to us for buying this product is the BSDi OS used at the
management controller. We have somewhat unusual requirements, including our
own internal protocol for dynamic routing of dialups, and the availability
of the BSDi environment behind Ascends new CLI makes this one of the few
real routers that works off the shelf.
We currently have one in house, and once some SNMP issues are fixed we will
be able to complete testing and then maybe buy some.
As to who is using them in a production environment, I understand from
colleagues that a recent "supercore" upgrade that PSI did in NY (where we
peer with them) was to roll out one or more GRF's. This is of course
unconfirmed rumour until someone from PSInet speaks up.
Regards,
--
Peter Galbavy
Demon Internet Ltd
http://www.demon.net/
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