On 7/21/05, Lars Hansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:35:27 -0500 > Kevin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > To be blunt, because when an enterprise just needs pure unfiltered > > inter-VLAN routing, Cisco has CEF products which can route between > > interfaces at bps and pps rates unapproachable using a general purpose > > Unix OS and COTS hardware. > > You know that CEF is just a poor exscuse for the pathetic performance > of the CPU's Cisco put in, right?
Fine, so you don't like Cisco. Substitute Raptor or Juniper or some other product that can do basic Inter-VLAN routing at 100,000 packets/second in even their low end products, That doesn't change the facts, just the brand name, the hue of the case, and maybe the reseller's profit margin. Regardless of whether you use the walks-on-water SysKonnect cards or "crappy" $470 Intel quad-EM cards, OpenBSD on i386 barely approaches half that rate, when doing nothing more than routing packets from one interface to another (but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this). > Dont' drink the Cisco sales rep's Kool-Aid. I'd be the first to argue in favor of the better non-Cisco pure-routing products, the ASIC-based "enterprise" core routers that can handle routing between multiple gigabit interfaces at wire speed... but I wouldn't try to sell my boss on replacing the big 6500 core routers with a couple of OpenBSD machines stuffed full of PCI-X cards. IOW, if the question is "How do I transfer packets as quickly as possible from one broadcast domain to another, without any thought for security?", maybe the answer shouldn't be "OpenBSD". Kevin (P.S. On the other hand, that wasn't Bill Chmura's original question, so maybe the answer for him *is* OpenBSD.)
