If y'all can deal with the BU, the Cat9k family is looking half-decent: MPLS PE/P, BGP L3VPN, BGP EVPN (VXLAN dataplane not MPLS) etc. UADP programmable pipeline ASIC, FIB ~200k, E-LLW, mandatory DNA license now covers software support...
Of course you do have to deal with a BU that lives in a parallel universe (SDA, LISP, NEAT etc) - but the hardware is the right price-perf, and IOS-XE is tolerable. No large FIB today, but Cisco appears to be headed towards "Silicon One" for all of their platforms: RTC ASIC strapped over some HBM. The strategy is interesting: sell it as a chip, sell it whitebox, sell it fully packaged. YMMV On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 7:40 AM Mark Tinka <mark.ti...@seacom.mu> wrote: > I think it's less about just the forwarding chips and more about an entire > solution that someone can go and buy without having to fiddle with it. > > You remember the saying, "Gone are the days when men were men and wrote > their own drivers"? Well, running a network is a full-time job, without > having to learn how to code for hardware and protocols. > > There are many start-ups that are working off of commodity chips and > commodity face plates. Building software for those disparate hardware > systems, and then developing the software so that it can be used in > commercial deployments is non-trivial. That is the leverage Cisco, Juniper, > Nokia... even Huawei, have, and they won't let us forget it. > > Then again, if one's vision is bold enough, they could play the long game, > start now, patiently build, and then come at us in 8 or so years. Because > the market, surely, can't continue at the rate we are currently going. > Everything else around us is dropping in price and revenue, and yet > traditional routing and switching equipment continues to stay the same, if > not increase. That's broken!` > > Mark. > > On 19/Jun/20 13:25, Robert Raszuk wrote: > > But talking about commodity isn't this mainly Broadcom ? And is there > single chip there which does not support line rate IP ? Or is there any > chip which supports MPLS and cost less then IP/MPLS one ? > > On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 1:22 PM Benny Lyne Amorsen via cisco-nsp > <cisco-...@puck.nether.net> wrote: > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Benny Lyne Amorsen <benny+use...@amorsen.dk> <benny+use...@amorsen.dk> > To: cisco-...@puck.nether.net > Cc: > Bcc: > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:12:06 +0200 > Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why? > Saku Ytti <s...@ytti.fi> <s...@ytti.fi> writes: > > > This is simply not fundamentally true, it may be true due to market > perversion. But give student homework to design label switching chip > and IPv6 switching chip, and you'll use less silicon for the label > switching chip. And of course you spend less overhead on the tunnel. > > What you say is obviously true. > > However, no one AFAIK makes an MPLS switch at prices comparable to basic > layer 3 IPv6 switches. You can argue that it is a market failure as much > as you want, but I can only buy what is on the market. According to the > market, MPLS is strictly Service Provider, with the accompanying Service > Provider markup (and then ridiculous discounts to make the prices seem > reasonable). Enterprise and datacenter are not generally using MPLS, and > I can only look on in envy at the prices of their equipment. > > There is room for a startup to rethink the service provider market by > using commodity enterprise equipment. Right now that means dumping MPLS, > since that is only available (if at all) at the most expensive license > level. Meanwhile you can get get low-scale BGPv6 and line-speed GRE with > commodity hardware without extra licenses. > > I am not saying that it will be easy to manage such a network, the > tooling for MPLS is vastly superior. I am merely saying that with just a > simple IPv6-to-the-edge network you can deliver similar services to an > MPLS-to-the-edge network at lower cost, if you can figure out how to > build the tooling. > > Per-packet overhead is hefty. Is that a problem today? > > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Benny Lyne Amorsen via cisco-nsp <cisco-...@puck.nether.net> > <cisco-...@puck.nether.net> > To: cisco-...@puck.nether.net > Cc: > Bcc: > Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:12:06 +0200 > Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why? > _______________________________________________ > cisco-nsp mailing list > cisco-nsp@puck.nether.nethttps://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp > archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ > > _______________________________________________ > cisco-nsp mailing list > cisco-nsp@puck.nether.nethttps://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp > archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ > . > > > -- Tim:>
