On 9/25/10 5:35 AM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: > On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 03:11:25AM -0400, Steven King wrote: >> Cisco uses their own ASICS is their higher end flag ship devices. >> Devices such as the Catalyst 6500 series or the 2960 switches. You >> pretty much singled out all the major players, including those who >> have been bought out (Foundry by HP) and claimed they do not provide >> their own, yet 3rd party flawed ASICS. I am actually surprised you >> didn't mention HP, Linksys or Dell as they are the most guilty of >> using 3rd party ASICS and shotty software. If you are buying data >> center grade equipment from these vendors, it will be quality hardware >> backed by their support (if purchased) such as Cisco's SmartNet >> agreements. > My point was that every major vendor, even the ones who normally make > their own in-house ASICs, are also actively selling third party silicon > (or in some cases complete third party boxes) in order to compete in the > "cheap" "datacenter optimized" space. Folks like HP and Dell were never > in the business of making real routers to begin with, so them selling a > Broadcom reference design with 30 seconds of search and replace action > on the bundled software is not much of a shocker. The guys who do a > better job of it, like Foundry (who was bought by Brocade, not HP), at > least manage to use their own OS as a wrapper around the third party > hardware. But my other major point was that almost all of these third > party ASICs are sub-par in some way compared to the more traditional > in-house hardware. Many of them have critical design flaws that will > limit them greatly, and many of these design flaws are only just now > being discovered by the router vendors who are selling them. > > BTW, Cisco is actually the exception to the "datacenter optimized" boxes > being third party, as their Nexus 7K is an evolution of the 6500/7600 > EARL ASICs, and their third party hw boxes are EZchip based ASR9k's. Of > course their Nexus software roadmap looks surprisingly similar to other > vendors doing it with third party hw, go figure. :) Cisco definitely is doing some interesting things with the Nexus. Have you seen the virtualized version? >> Moral of the story, do your research on the devices you plan to >> implement and ask for data sheets on how the features you need are >> handled (in software or hardware). I know Juniper and Cisco provide >> such documentation for their devices. Quality hardware, however more >> expensive, will give you less trouble in the long run. You truly get >> what you pay for in the networking industry. > It takes a pretty significant amount of experience and inside knowledge > to know who is producing the hardware and what the particular issues > are, which is probably well beyond most people. The vendors aren't going > to come out and tell you "Oh woops we can't actually install a full > routing table in our FIB like we said we could", or "Oh btw this box > can't filter control-plane traffic and any packet kiddie with a T1 can > take you down", or "FYI you won't be able to bill your customers 'cause > the vlan counters don't work", or "just so you know, this box can't load > balance for shit, and L2 netflow won't work", or "yeah sorry you'll > never be able to do a double stack MPLS VPN". The devil is in the > caveats, and the commodity silicon that's all over the datacenter space > right now is certainly full of them. I agree it takes a significant amount of experience to know that informatin off the top of your head, but I am able to find block diagrams, and part information for 98% of Cisco's hardware. Old or new. One needs to do their research on the device to know if it meets their needs. The caveats are everywhere I agree, even some of the experienced network guys get tripped up with them if they aren't careful. Planning is the key to overcoming these problems.
-- Steve King Senior Linux Engineer - Advance Internet, Inc. Cisco Certified Network Associate CompTIA Linux+ Certified Professional CompTIA A+ Certified Professional
