Metromedia Fiber Network files for bankruptcy
As predicted: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020520/nym120_1.html --Mitch NetSide I am here to bury Caesar not to praise him.
Re: EBITDA [was Re: Interconnects]
On Mon, 20 May 2002 12:08:32 EDT, Chris Woodfield said: Intermedia, for example, was EBITDA positive for all of the time I was working for them, yet was bleeding approx. $100 million plus in interest payments per year. This created a very real cash crunch that prompted the sale to Worldcom. I believe the *original* comment was If they're EBITDA-negative, they're *really* screwed without more cash(*). -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech (*) As many dot-bombed discovered when the bubble burst... msg01974/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: route statistics
I'm trying to collect statistics on how many routes match certain patterns. So far I've been using zebra, set term len 0, and then sh ip bgp regexp, and wait for the total prefixes count at the end of the list. I figure there must be a better way than this, but so far haven't found one. Any ideas? Zebra supports dumping the RIB to MRT binary format. See the 'dump bgp' family of commands. I find this format much easier to deal with than CLI output. Bradley I've been told getting the MRT sources to build is rather difficult. I may give it a shot anyway... -Ralph
RE: route statistics
You could rebuild the source rpm to any flavour also. /Dee -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Bradley Dunn Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:47 AM To: Ralph Doncaster Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: route statistics I've been told getting the MRT sources to build is rather difficult. I may give it a shot anyway... Yeah I haven't been able to build directly from the MRT source recently. On FreeBSD building from the ports tree works fine. On Linux SuSE has an RPM at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.3/suse/n3/mrt.rpm that works on Linux flavors. Bradley
RADB mirroring
RADB definately does not mirror (at least not daily) ARIN's RR. Time to setup with altdb... % ARIN Internet Routing Registry Whois Interface route: 66.11.160.0/20 descr: Doncaster Consulting Inc. 2720 Queensview Dr Ottawa, ON K2B 1A5 CA origin:AS21936 notify:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mnt-by:MNT-ISTOP changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20020517 source:ARIN [ralph@cpu1693 lralph]$ whois [EMAIL PROTECTED] [whois.radb.net] % No entries found for the selected source(s). Ralph Doncaster principal, IStop.com div. of Doncaster Consulting Inc.
multilink frame relay
I was wondering if there was any online / hardcopy information about multilink frame relay that you have found useful. I was also wondering if there was any online / hardcopy information comparing multilink frame relay to standard frame relay that you have found useful as well. replies appreciated _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
Re: portscans (was Re: Arbor Networks DoS defense product)
[ On Sunday, May 19, 2002 at 16:30:48 (-0700), Dan Hollis wrote: ] Subject: Re: portscans (was Re: Arbor Networks DoS defense product) On Sun, 19 May 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote: Such technology is very dangerous if automated. And if its not? If it's not an automated system then it's only as dangerous as the person(s) controlling it, plus whatever propensity they have for making unintended errors that would not be made by a properly tested automatic system -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Planix, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RADB mirroring
Ralph Doncaster wrote: RADB definately does not mirror (at least not daily) ARIN's RR. [...] Correct -- not at all. Can anybody speak toward the purpose of the ARIN RR? An IRR not mirrored by the RADB (to act as a member) and not mirroring every RR mirrored by the RADB (to hijack the top level) seems pointless. I've been meaning to try to dig up a contact (from a customer), but haven't had a chance... Peter E. Fry
Re: RADB mirroring
An IRR not mirrored by the RADB (to act as a member) and not mirroring every RR mirrored by the RADB (to hijack the top level) seems pointless. auto-config tools, such as ratoolset, do not use the mirrored data, only the origin data. one specifies the list of registries to search. so, mirroring by the irr is neither necessary nor sufficient, though it can be convenient for lookup by wetware. randy
Re: EBITDA [was Re: Interconnects]
My take on ebitda, it is what non profitable companies use to put a positive spin on their situation. Bri On Mon, 20 May 2002, Chris Woodfield wrote: The main fallacy of EBITDA is that a lot of people confuse EBIDTA figures with cash flow figures. While the utility of a quarterly figure showing cash flow PL, stripping off all noncash transactions, would be substantial, most companies prefer to quote EBIDTA instead, which, while disregarding all noncash figures, also removes interest and taxes as well, both of which are very much recurring cash expenditures and should be included in cash-flow PL figures. In the absence of a cash-flow P/L figure, a lot of people look at EBITDA instead and forget about the very real cash expenditures involved with interest and taxes (and often other case expenditures that the company chooses to throw out in order to make the number look better). Intermedia, for example, was EBITDA positive for all of the time I was working for them, yet was bleeding approx. $100 million plus in interest payments per year. This created a very real cash crunch that prompted the sale to Worldcom. -C On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 06:09:56PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote: On Sat, 18 May 2002, Mike Leber wrote: press releases regarding their other choices, or perhaps considering whether the companies they consider alternatives are EBITDA postive (making a profit, or in otherwords will exist in 12 months) today (not in an imaginary planned future) or for the few that are EBITDA positive, whether they actually seem to want your business. EBITDA positive does not mean profitable, or even necessarily financially stable. EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amoritization -- all things that tend to have an impact on your finances. If you were using EBITDA as the measure of your personal financial situation, you could spend far more than your after tax income, but less than your before tax income, and declare yourself to have come out ahead. Your bank, however, probably wouldn't see it that way. The same goes for corporate finance, except that the corporations that were announcing their EBITDA numbers as the important financial data often had enough in the bank, and enough market cap, that it didn't become a critical problem for a few years. My understanding is that EBITDA does have legitimate accounting uses, but I'm not clear on what they are. I'm tempted to label this message as off-topic nitpicking, but given that the biggest problem with Internet stability at the moment seems to be financial, I'm not sure it is. -Steve Steve Gibbard [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Routes down to yahoo.com, etc. from Wash DC?
IS it just us out hereon the Right Coast in the Washington DC area, but are a number of routes to the Bay Area and Southern California down? We can't get traceroutes through or customer connections to www.yahoo.com, while other like www.msn.com and http://home.netscape.com come in just fine. Is it www.yahoo.com, maybe? Just wondering, as I narrowly veer close to the edge of being on-topic. :-) Mary Grace
Re: Routes down to yahoo.com, etc. from Wash DC?
www.yahoo.com has been akawhoknows. You'll need to specify which IP address you were really trying to go to. On Mon, 20 May 2002, Mary Grace wrote: IS it just us out hereon the Right Coast in the Washington DC area, but are a number of routes to the Bay Area and Southern California down? We can't get traceroutes through or customer connections to www.yahoo.com, while other like www.msn.com and http://home.netscape.com come in just fine. Is it www.yahoo.com, maybe? Just wondering, as I narrowly veer close to the edge of being on-topic. :-) Mary Grace
Re: RADB mirroring
### On Mon, 20 May 2002 13:35:34 -0700, Randy Bush [EMAIL PROTECTED] casually ### decided to expound upon Peter E. Fry [EMAIL PROTECTED] the following ### thoughts about Re: RADB mirroring: RB An IRR not mirrored by the RADB (to act as a member) and not RB mirroring every RR mirrored by the RADB (to hijack the top level) RB seems pointless. RB RB auto-config tools, such as ratoolset, do not use the mirrored data, RB only the origin data. one specifies the list of registries to RB search. so, mirroring by the irr is neither necessary nor RB sufficient, though it can be convenient for lookup by wetware. RADB and other IRRs running IRRd accept a !s command to set (change from default) the specified sources (including mirrored sources). The return for each query is done on a first-hit matching mechanism. One may conceivably switch/modify search orders prior to each query. IRRToolSet (formerly RAToolSet) has the capability of specifying a different IRR server but this means one would incur a penalty for closing and reopening connections between switching servers. It is far better (and friendlier to the IRRs) from a performance standpoint to keep persistant connections to a single server that is fully mirroring. -- /*===[ Jake Khuon [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]==+ | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers /| / [~ [~ |) | | --- | | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation / |/ [_ [_ |) |_| N E T W O R K S | +=*/
Canonical bogon list?
Does anyone know of a source for a reliable bogon list? The best I know if is from Rob Thomas, but his last template update was 10/01, and IANA's made allocations since then. http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space is the best I can find, but wanted to see if anyone had a more thorough compilation.. If someone (IANA?) kept a MAINT-BOGON object in one of the IRR's, it'd be fantastic w/ just a bit of hacking on RtConfig. Any takers? ..kg..
Re: Interconnects
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Daniel Golding) writes: PAIX shares MFN/Abovenet's peering agreements? That's quite a trick. ... No. PAIX has no peering agreements of any kind. This is not to slam PAIX or Paul Vixie - I'm a big PAIX fan, and Paul has done a superb job. However, MFN adds no value, and only hurts PAIX's credibility with it's massive financial problem. PAIX without MFN will, once again, be a great thing. Hopefully this will be soon. To the best of my knowledge, our parent company's woes have not been noticed by PAIX's customers (unless such a customer has its own separate relationship to the parent company, which PAIX would have no knowledge of.) And, thanks for your kind words. -- Paul Vixie [EMAIL PROTECTED] President, PAIX.Net Inc.
Re: RADB mirroring
At 1:35 PM -0700 20/5/02, Randy Bush wrote: An IRR not mirrored by the RADB (to act as a member) and not mirroring every RR mirrored by the RADB (to hijack the top level) seems pointless. auto-config tools, such as ratoolset, do not use the mirrored data, only the origin data. one specifies the list of registries to search. so, mirroring by the irr is neither necessary nor sufficient, though it can be convenient for lookup by wetware. I think you will find that they can be configured to use different sources but they are at the same registry so you need to find a registry that mirrors all the sources you want to query. Mark.
The market must be coming back
Everyone's so busy there hasn't been a peep on here in weeks. Regards, Christopher J. Wolff, VP CIO Broadband Laboratories http://www.bblabs.com
Re: The market must be coming back
Actually, there has been a lot of peeping! On Mon, 20 May 2002, Christopher J. Wolff wrote: Everyone's so busy there hasn't been a peep on here in weeks. Regards, Christopher J. Wolff, VP CIO Broadband Laboratories http://www.bblabs.com
Re: The market must be coming back
On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 05:27:20PM -0700, Christopher J. Wolff wrote: Everyone's so busy there hasn't been a peep on here in weeks. Regards, Christopher J. Wolff, VP CIO Nah, we're just not allowed to post here anymore. Inside joke with myself, please ignore ; -dre
Re: Canonical bogon list?
Hi, Kevin. ] Does anyone know of a source for a reliable bogon list? The best I know if ] is from Rob Thomas, but his last template update was 10/01, and IANA's ] made allocations since then. Actually, the mistake is that I've updated my template yet failed to change the date. DOH! Sorry about that. I do keep up with the IANA allocations and ensure these are removed from my sundry templates. I just did a sanity check to ensure I am not blocking anything allocated by IANA, and all is well. Thanks, Rob. -- Rob Thomas http://www.cymru.com ASSERT(coffee != empty);
RE: Network Reliability Engineering
While it is possible to get the FIT numbers for hardware and calculate network availability, our experience has been that modelling hardware reliability and calculating network availability was not particularly usefull as hardware and fiber transmission systems are usually the least signifigant factor in overall network availability. Hardware failures are also easy to design around by redundant hardware, or more boxes, or diverse fiber routes. Network software issues and Operational mistakes seem to affect Network Availability more than hardware. An example would be a bug in a routing protocol that causes an erroneous update to propagate through the network. Or in the operational category, a typo which causes unintended results. In both cases these failures are not limited to one box, but often cause problems or their effects to propagate throughout the entire network. How do you objectively calculate the network availability when the network is highly dependant upon the correct functioning of a binary blob of proprietary code, but your only visability inside the blob is a release note listing the symptoms experienced by others who have run the code in a similar, but probably not identical network configuration? It seems unlikely that vendors are going to disclose more about their proprietary blob of binary to protect their I.P. assets. This leaves teh netwrok operator without much to assess code reliability. Perhaps we need to change the business model around network code licensing to ensure vendors comprehend the impact of a bad release, and share the pain when they release a buggy blob that has customer impact on the network. Rather than a one-time fee to license the code when you buy the box, a small recurring monthly license fee, with no payment in any month that a software bug crashes your network, would act as a continuous form of positive reinforcement for your box vendor to ensure your network has high availability code. The box vendor would have a recurring revenue stream for software licensing that is only as stable and reliable as their software. -R -Original Message- From: Pete Kruckenberg To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 5/18/2002 7:13 PM Subject: Network Reliability Engineering I'm looking for some good reference materials to do some reliability engineering calculations and projections. This is to justify increased redundancy, and I want to include quantifiable numbers based on MTBF data and other reliability factors, kind of a scientific justification instead of just the typical emotional appeal using analyst/vendor FUD. I'd appreciate references on how to do this in a network environment (what data to collect, how to collect it, how to analyze, etc). Also any data (or rules of thumb) on typical MTBFs for network events that I won't find on vendor product slicks (like what's the MTBF on IOS, or human-caused service outages of various types, etc). If someone has put together something remotely like this that they'd care to share, that'd be incredibly helpful. Thanks. Pete.
RE: The market must be coming back
Chris: I've been thinking about leasing some dark fiber and running one of the new 10gigE blades for the Cat 6500 chassis. Be careful here. Last I tested (at one of our channels that also resells Cisco) is that the 10GbE on the Catalyst 6500 hasn't broken 4G throughput yet. Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's 10% throughput... Why waste the money, just buy FE!). The GSR is up to about 8G throughput nowadays from what I've seen. Foundry Networks (my company) can get a perfect clean 8G throughput on all of our chassis with management modules M2 or above (we don't support 10GbE on the legacy M1). Our NG chassis will be available later in the year for those folks that want 4 X 10 GbE on each module (8 slot chassis). I expect this will be a perfect 40G throughput since I've never seen us do anything less than perfect (been working here since August). Additionally, you would be the first customer I've heard about doing standards based 10GbE on a Catalyst. (feel free to chime in if you're doing this... Can I bring my SmartBits 600 to your site to test throughput?). Good luck! Foundry has a few references: Deployed: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_3_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_2_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr2_11_02.html Many others that we don't press release. We've got these blades running in production networks here in Japan that I'm not allowed to talk about. Also many other places. Deploying: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr5_8_02.html Performance: http://www.spirentcom.com/news/press.cfm?id=87 Throw in the Cisco Flamethrower GBIC and I should be good for 50 miles. Has anyone tried this? Foundry Network's Long Haul (LHB: 150 km, LHA: 70 km) Ethernet optics exceed Cisco's on GbE (ZX: 100 km). I'm sure we exceed them on the ER LAN PHY for 10GbE. We've only tested to 85 kilometers (ER). 802.3ae standard is 40 km: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020508/nyw068_1.html Cisco's website says they can do the 802.3ae standard 40 km on the 1550 nm blade. I'm not sure if the optics are changeable either: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ifaa/6500ggml/ I doubt if there is a GBIC for 10GbE available. We use the same blade with changeable optics; however, I would not call the SR (300 meters), LR (10 km), and ER LAN PHY optics GBIC's... Moral of this story is that BEFORE you buy these blades from Cisco (or anybody), test them! If you don't have 10GbE SmartBits or IXIA, you can use 1GbE interfaces and wrap them around until you get 8G (no need to produced anything higher 'cause the Cat 6500 has an 8G throughput limitation). Don't test latency with this method :-). I don't believe the marketing from any company, not even my own. I test, then tell. I've personally never seen a packet drop at a steady 8G rate for up to 72 hours; however, one of our customers evaluating the 10GbE blades reported 2 64 byte packet's were dropped in a 12 hour line rate test. I suspect they had bad fiber. Gary Blankenship Systems Engineer Foundry Networks
RE: The market must be coming back
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Gary that want 4 X 10 GbE on each module (8 slot chassis). I expect this will be a perfect 40G throughput since I've never seen us do anything less than perfect (been working here since August). Oh phuleeese Stop drinking your own Kool-Aid(tm). To honestly suggest that Foundry, or any other vendor for that matter, never does 'anything less than perfect' is nothing less than idiotic. If Foundry does things so 'perfect' why do they have a TAC? Why do they have bugs? Why do they even need to release new software ever again? Obviously what is out now will solve every possible issue - its 'perfect' right? The only possible answer according to your logic, is to support customers who are 'doing it wrong' and need to be educated. Go find the nice black shirts that were passed out at Foundry's last Kool-Aid fest. You are in obvious need of one. This is NOT the place to post vendor FUD. All you are doing is making Foundry look bad, and making yourself look even worse. My apologies to NANOG.. .chance Mommy, my Kool-Aid tastes funny. - Katie, Age 7 Jonestown 10/18/78 Additionally, you would be the first customer I've heard about doing standards based 10GbE on a Catalyst. (feel free to chime in if you're doing this... Can I bring my SmartBits 600 to your site to test throughput?). Good luck! Foundry has a few references: Deployed: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_3_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_2_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr2_11_02.html Many others that we don't press release. We've got these blades running in production networks here in Japan that I'm not allowed to talk about. Also many other places. Deploying: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr5_8_02.h tml Performance: http://www.spirentcom.com/news/press.cfm?id=87 Throw in the Cisco Flamethrower GBIC and I should be good for 50 miles. Has anyone tried this? Foundry Network's Long Haul (LHB: 150 km, LHA: 70 km) Ethernet optics exceed Cisco's on GbE (ZX: 100 km). I'm sure we exceed them on the ER LAN PHY for 10GbE. We've only tested to 85 kilometers (ER). 802.3ae standard is 40 km: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020508/nyw068_1.html Cisco's website says they can do the 802.3ae standard 40 km on the 1550 nm blade. I'm not sure if the optics are changeable either: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ifaa/6500ggml/ I doubt if there is a GBIC for 10GbE available. We use the same blade with changeable optics; however, I would not call the SR (300 meters), LR (10 km), and ER LAN PHY optics GBIC's... Moral of this story is that BEFORE you buy these blades from Cisco (or anybody), test them! If you don't have 10GbE SmartBits or IXIA, you can use 1GbE interfaces and wrap them around until you get 8G (no need to produced anything higher 'cause the Cat 6500 has an 8G throughput limitation). Don't test latency with this method :-). I don't believe the marketing from any company, not even my own. I test, then tell. I've personally never seen a packet drop at a steady 8G rate for up to 72 hours; however, one of our customers evaluating the 10GbE blades reported 2 64 byte packet's were dropped in a 12 hour line rate test. I suspect they had bad fiber. Gary Blankenship Systems Engineer Foundry Networks
Re: The market must be coming back
On 2002-05-21-00:14:30, Gary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's 10% throughput... Why waste the money, just buy FE!). How did the Foundry test lab arrive at those figures, and what substances were consumed at the time? I'd say 300+ mbit/sec on a PA-GE is a more accurate real-world limit, assuming you've got plenty of spare CPU cycles to burn, and no ACL's. Besides, that's really an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think anyone, including Cisco, has ever made the claim that it can do line rate GbE; that's not to say it isn't useful for certain topologies requiring slightly-faster-than-fast-e router-switch uplinks, etc. -a
Re: The market must be coming back
On Mon, 20 May 2002, Christopher J. Wolff wrote: Everyone's so busy there hasn't been a peep on here in weeks. I don't know.. it's been fairly chatty on here. At times more so and more often on a single thread than usual. One report claims that the job boards have exploded in parts of the world recently with large numbers of new positions opening. Anyone report claims that the market is getting better and that this is expected. I know in the UK a lot of departments would have got new budgets last month which would have caused the above effects there. Probably true of other parts of the world also. -- Avleen Vig Work Time: Unix Systems Administrator Play Time: Network Security Officer Smurf Amplifier Finding Executive: http://www.ircnetops.org/smurf
Re: The market must be coming back
On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 10:33:32PM -0600, Chance Whaley wrote: Oh phuleeese Stop drinking your own Kool-Aid(tm). To honestly suggest that Foundry, or any other vendor for that matter, never does 'anything less than perfect' is nothing less than idiotic. If Foundry does things so 'perfect' why do they have a TAC? Why do they have bugs? Why do they even need to release new software ever again? Obviously what is out now will solve every possible issue - its 'perfect' right? The only possible answer according to your logic, is to support customers who are 'doing it wrong' and need to be educated. Personally I would say that Foundry does EVERYTHING less than perfect. Nearly everyone I'm aware of (including myself) who has had to misfortune to try and use their devices in a service provider environment and a layer 3 role has come away with a universal loathing of biblical proportions. I really can't stress this enough, it DOES NOT MATTER how many gigabits your box forwards. A router is ONLY as useful as the quality of its software and support, if you can't login to it or have working routing protocols, it's just a big paperweight. The only wannabe cisco company I have seen learn this lesson is Juniper, and I am firmly convinced this is the reason for their success in the core. Whenever I read a press release about Foundry in the core, I stop and take a moment to laugh uncontrollably. It has nothing to do with ISIS or MPLS, it has to do with making your existing functionality work correctly and behave in a sensible fashion. Nothing personal against Foundry, but the people in charge couldn't possibly not get it any more than they do now. -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
Re: Cisco 7200 VXR with NPE-400 (was RE: The market must be coming back)
On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 07:27:35AM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: I have personally seen a 7200 with PXF-chip and two PA-GE do NAT at 300megabit with a few (10-15) ftp streams going thru it. With more random load it wouldn't go much above 100 meg, though. I have done 400Mbit with an NPE400, though that's pushing the box close to its limits. But really, a good engineer knows his tools and knows how to choose them for the task. If you want to push 900Mbps, you don't pick a router with a central software based route lookup system and PCI based backplane. On the other hand, if you need to do complex things, a 7200 may be your best bet simply because of its simplicity. All the nasty bugs that make using a GSR so miserable almost never manifest themselves on a 7200. If you're adventurous you can even install the latest code and probably not pay for your transgression against the IOS gods within 48 hours. :) And please, lab tests doesnt show it all. Does the Foundry have a route cache? How many entries? I have seen equipment that performs perfectly in the lab start to bog down when you put real traffic on them, because of route cache limitations (for instance, 256.000 entries starts to be problematic when you have thousands of customers running real internet traffic thru the device). A classic Foundry flaw, which you can get around to some extent with ip net-agg or dr-agg. I've found it best to treat a Foundry doing layer 3 like you would a 7500. You know, tiptoe when you walk by it, try not to give it any funny looks, only login to it when you REALLY need to, only make changes at 2am, etc, it is usable in a customer aggregation role. Anything more is tempting fate. And if^H^Hwhen you run into a really fun issue, don't even think about calling Foundry TAC after hours, all you'll get is someone's house with their screaming kids in the background. -- Richard A Steenbergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
RE: The market must be coming back
Jason, Are you espousing Juniper or Foundry for 10ge? -Original Message- From: Jason LeBlanc [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:35 PM To: Gary; Christopher J. Wolff Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: The market must be coming back Juniper. Sorry I'm a fan, they've done a lot right. Cisco is ~$35k per port of 10ge, and unless you get a 6513 you can't get many interfaces. This makes 10ge in a real network (where everything needs to be redundant, multiple interfaces, etc) a bit impossible on the Catalyst platform. If your needs are but a few interfaces, maybe it works. Cisco is woefully behind here. The SUP2/SFM method of doing things is a patch at best to boot. Foundry is cheaper and a bit ahead in many aspects, granted there are SW issues still looming, but the 'life of a packet' as a packet is handled by a Foundry switch makes a lot more sense. Foundry ASIC's are rockin, as are Juniper's, Cisco seems to be lost here. I think the ASIC designers ran off to Foundry and Juniper. ;) If only Juniper made 'switches', such that density were higher, cost per port were lower and they were more applicable to switching (L2/STP, etc) and LAN specific needs. Additionally, anyone have thoughts on the Unisphere purchase by Juniper? I think it should scare the bejesus out of Cisco. Always interested in the opinions of the brightest, let the flames begin. ;) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Gary Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 9:15 PM To: Christopher J. Wolff Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: The market must be coming back Chris: I've been thinking about leasing some dark fiber and running one of the new 10gigE blades for the Cat 6500 chassis. Be careful here. Last I tested (at one of our channels that also resells Cisco) is that the 10GbE on the Catalyst 6500 hasn't broken 4G throughput yet. Sort of like buying a GbE interface for a 7200 (It only get's 10% throughput... Why waste the money, just buy FE!). The GSR is up to about 8G throughput nowadays from what I've seen. Foundry Networks (my company) can get a perfect clean 8G throughput on all of our chassis with management modules M2 or above (we don't support 10GbE on the legacy M1). Our NG chassis will be available later in the year for those folks that want 4 X 10 GbE on each module (8 slot chassis). I expect this will be a perfect 40G throughput since I've never seen us do anything less than perfect (been working here since August). Additionally, you would be the first customer I've heard about doing standards based 10GbE on a Catalyst. (feel free to chime in if you're doing this... Can I bring my SmartBits 600 to your site to test throughput?). Good luck! Foundry has a few references: Deployed: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_3_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr4_2_02.html http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr2_11_02.html Many others that we don't press release. We've got these blades running in production networks here in Japan that I'm not allowed to talk about. Also many other places. Deploying: http://www.foundrynet.com/about/newsevents/releases/pr5_8_02.html Performance: http://www.spirentcom.com/news/press.cfm?id=87 Throw in the Cisco Flamethrower GBIC and I should be good for 50 miles. Has anyone tried this? Foundry Network's Long Haul (LHB: 150 km, LHA: 70 km) Ethernet optics exceed Cisco's on GbE (ZX: 100 km). I'm sure we exceed them on the ER LAN PHY for 10GbE. We've only tested to 85 kilometers (ER). 802.3ae standard is 40 km: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020508/nyw068_1.html Cisco's website says they can do the 802.3ae standard 40 km on the 1550 nm blade. I'm not sure if the optics are changeable either: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ifaa/6500ggml/ I doubt if there is a GBIC for 10GbE available. We use the same blade with changeable optics; however, I would not call the SR (300 meters), LR (10 km), and ER LAN PHY optics GBIC's... Moral of this story is that BEFORE you buy these blades from Cisco (or anybody), test them! If you don't have 10GbE SmartBits or IXIA, you can use 1GbE interfaces and wrap them around until you get 8G (no need to produced anything higher 'cause the Cat 6500 has an 8G throughput limitation). Don't test latency with this method :-). I don't believe the marketing from any company, not even my own. I test, then tell. I've personally never seen a packet drop at a steady 8G rate for up to 72 hours; however, one of our customers evaluating the 10GbE blades reported 2 64 byte packet's were dropped in a 12 hour line rate test. I suspect they had bad fiber. Gary Blankenship Systems Engineer Foundry Networks
