On Wednesday 14 June 2006 12:17, Ronny wrote:
> Can we compare and contrast on technical qualities.
> I know this might hurt most of you I think Cisco is slow
> at technology and greedy shihhhhh!
As Mark has already said, you should search the NANOG archives.
(I believe in that discussion Juniper routers came up)
First off, FUD aside, much as CISCO is commercial, you have to
agree that lots of the IEEE specs and some RFCs have a lot of
their contribution so I wouldn't say they're slow at tech. Quite
the opposite. They have a habit of pushing proprietary
protocols/features that don't play nice with other vendors. Of
course that has its merits and demerits.
In short:
CISCO (or any other proprietary vendor):
- the hardware is generally more reliable (low power, high dust
tolerance, no disks and other moving parts (save a fan))[1]
- in many instances a lot of the packet processing is done at
the hardware level by the interface cards without involving the
CPU that much. i.e typically lower latency.[2]
- binary OS tracks with different features. I guess the
advantages and disadvantages of that are obvious.[3]
LINUX:
- you'd probably have to invest more to get hardware as reliable
i.e disk on chip, fanless boards, etc.
- most of the packet processing will be done at the software
level so you'll generally have higher latency.[2]
- Open (and Free) operating system base allows you great
flexibility, probably requires more tweaking time and the other
usual advantages and disadvantages.[3]
There could be other differences, but those are the first that
spring to my mind. I think there is a place for each and you
can't have one blanket rating of one over the other.
--
patrick
[1] the boards of most of the low end CISCO boxes are based on
the Intel 486 boards.
[2] in situations where lots of processing power is needed (like
cryptography in VPNs). The lower end CISCOs without built in
hardware support for that may be slower than the typical Linux
box running on a 3 GHZ P3 or P4 machine.
[3] flexibility of packet filters is one example of where Linux
will shine - to get the same in CISCO you'll probably have to
get a separate PIX.
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