What is the limit? (was RE: multi-homing fixes)

Wed Aug 29 23:30:45 UTC 2001

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:44:56PM -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> Your average PC doesn't have to be NEBS-compliant, doesn't have to work
> more than 24 hours w/o crashing, and doesn't have quite strict constraints
> on power & heat dissipation.  It doesn't have to have redundant power, and
> its components are readily available and cheap (those are produced in
> _large_ batches).

I'm going to poke Vadim a bit. :-)

If you're building a multi-bay router (a la a number of new designs)
why not use a bay for the general purpose functions?  Specifically
something like a sun E10000, or HP v-class (to illustrate top of
the line but off the shelf) connected into the fabric?  Why even try
to build the processing on a board (with all the power and heat
constraints) for a system that large (say 16 bays)?

Of course, this doesn't work too well if you have to take a full bay
for a "routing engine" for a quarter rack forwarding chassis, so the
approch doesn't work on the smaller side, but that said there are
lots of N-Way servers available.

Bottom line, why doesn't a router vendor partner with a host builder,
and let them do what they do best (build a host), while the router
vendor does what they do best (build forwarding hardware)?  I guess
you could argue Juniper did this, although I find it hard to consider
it a partnership when one side is free software.

For the record, big, multi-rack but "single management" routers make
me nervous.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org
Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
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