10GE router resource

Thu Mar 27 12:37:08 UTC 2008

Yes, when I said IOS runs on top of Linux I was specifically referring to
the ASR, not both the ASR and the Nexus 7K.  Both platforms were just
announced, and Cisco has decade long (at least) plans for their life cycle,
particularly given how much was invested in their development.

The ASR can punt packets to the RP, but it has complete separation between
the control and data plane in my understanding.

Fred Reimer, CISSP, CCNP, CQS-VPN, CQS-ISS
Senior Network Engineer
Coleman Technologies, Inc.
954-298-1697

-----Original Message-----
From: Lincoln Dale [mailto:ltd at interlink.com.au] 
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 2:46 AM
To: Fred Reimer; 'Lamar Owen'; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: RE: 10GE router resource

> That said, it
> is notable that Cisco is now running their latest announced hardware,
> primarily the Nexus 7000's and ASR's, run a Linux kernel and IOS on top of
> that.

Moore's Law may have helped software packet forwarding rates but there's
still
2 to 3 orders of magnitude performance difference between hardware &
software.

just to be clear about a few things:

in the case of Nexus 7K the control-plane runs atop of Linux, data-plane
runs
entirely in custom packet forwarding ASICs distributed on the I/O (linecard)
modules.  N7K never drops to "software forwarding".  the first forwarding
engine in N7K does 60M PPS with all features enabled.  i.e. you could be
performing ACLs on port, VLAN & routed on both ingress & egress, doing
netflow,
policing, QoS, whatever - its still 60M PPS.

you'll see that pps numbers scale upwards as the product progresses through
its
roadmap.

Cisco doesn't make any secret of N7K running atop of Linux, the reality is
that
it doesn't have to be Linux, it could be any SMP/multi-threaded capable
POSIX-compliant kernel, it just so happens that Linux makes sense for a
variety
of reasons.

Also, perhaps pedantic but just to be absolutely clear: N7K doesn't run on
IOS,
it runs on NX-OS.

ASR is slightly different, it can perform packet processing in software
(IOSd)
however that is really only meant for things that don't make sense to
implement
in what is now called the QuantumFlow programmable processor.  e.g. if you
needed your AppleTalk or Vines running at millions of packets/second, then
i'd
argue you have bigger problems. :)

cheers,

lincoln.

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