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

Wed Aug 29 23:57:27 UTC 2001

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Leo Bicknell wrote:

> 
> 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. :-)

You're welcome :)

> 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)?

:) That was in the original Pluris presentations.  Then the race against
competition forced to go to specialized design.  Density & power
parameters were simply uncompetitive for off-the-shelf parts-only designs,
as compared to large Cisco and Juniper boxes.

However, the way Pluris optical fabric is designed, it is easy to add
lower-capacity bays to existing routers (i.e. not 12Gbps/card slot,
but, say, 12Gbps/bay); and I think we'll see hybrid router/server farms
in the future.

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

Cannot say about other designs, but Pluris has distributed redundant
control (i.e. each bay has its own control cards).  This is no different
from the redundancy point of view from clustered routers.  A lot more
manageable, though, since all those controller cards are synchronized
configuration-wise.

--vadim