On Tuesday, July 13, 2010 04:53:55 am Dobbins, Roland wrote: > When a single botted/misbehaving host easily can take down a software-based > BRAS, that's a pretty strong indication that software-based edge devices are > contraindicated, heh.
I'm assuming you have data on that assertion, right? And can we compare that with a 'hardware' BRAS with a weak control plane CPU? Say, Cisco 7600 with Sup720 and badly configured COPP? > Software-based edge devices have been obsolete for a long time, now. They're > a great risk to operators who've yet to replace them with hardware-based > devices. Let's run this rabbit. Is there really a true hardware router or BRAS out there? Or are we misusing the term 'hardware-based' to really mean 'hardware accelerated?' Further, is the data plane on hardware accelerated routers really truly hardware-based, or does the firmware, microcode, FPGA bitstreams, and other software do the heavy lifting? And isn't the control plane in a BRAS arguably more critical than the data plane, as it has lots of work to do that requires software running on a general purpose processor to do it? And aren't many 'hardware' routers weak on the control plane side of the house? Which one can be refitted to do IPv6 the quickest, and in the most robust manner? And without requiring a budget-busting (and maybe even bankrupting) expenditure to swap out the whole works (or the majority of the works)? Which one requires the least capex when you yet again overflow your routing tables? Which one is the quickest to get patched when bugs are found?
