"Packet Shapers"

Fri Jul 31 14:53:39 UTC 1998

> Not everyone has Cisco, and the QA on Cisco releases has not been the
> greatest.  Bash in all of the above into IOS and how much you wanna bet
> that we will need version (19cc) before all the components work (i.e. FR,
> SNMP, HSSI, PPP, BGP, etc.)  Each of us has slowed down in installing new
> versions in critical systems due to these numerous bugs and flaws.

I think some of this could be solved if cisco's release methodology was
properly understood industry wide.  It is somewhat unique.  The CC train
especially is different that way (it breaks a lot of constraints and
boundaries otherwise designed to keep bugs out of the code in favor of
getting near geekcode and feature rich stuff out there quickly).

> Cisco has WCCP but yet many people prefer Alteon or Intokomi (sp?).  Ask
> yourself why.

Well, given certain scenarios, WCCP is actually a significant strength, and
Inktomi/etc's reliance on another vendors' L2/L4 switch does not only
increase complexity of the solution (multiple vendors etc) but also tie in
into backbones, for instance.  Alteon to me is everything but a strength.
WCCP is probably only in its infancy, and I have found that its
functionality is overall not well understood.  And the competitive market
does its fair share to declassify WCCP as policy routing in a new gown etc
etc -- no need for me to reproduce their marketing propaganda, just the
stuff you'd expect in a market segment with heated (and overvalued) IPOs
etc.

> You are on the mark in regards to OC-3 being too small these days.  None
> of these boxes scale to OC-12; neither do firewalls.  Wouldn't be suprised
> if some Pluris or Juniper came out with some MPP box that can do all of
> the above.

Well, I think that I have all the above in our current platform, actually.
Once Juniper actually has a product which we can get into the labs, I'd love
to beat it up to see what it is worth and how good its Q&A is etc etc.  No
doubt, they are on the horizon, but not here yet.

Unless perhaps someone from Juniper is listening and could get in touch with
me to get this in here.

Cheers,
Chris

--
Christian Kuhtz, BellSouth Corp., Sr. Network Architect  <ck at bellsouth.net>
1100 Ashwood Parkway, Atlanta, GA 30338                        <ck at gnu.org>