Slashdot Mirror
Is Hyperchip Hype?
Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about
Hyperchip, a Montreal-based
company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?"
The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.
It looks a bit like the PC processor industry - they're pushing the technology to its limits just so that they can claim they're the fastest. What happens when the bandwidth requirements have also scaled 1000 times? There are no overclocking options here folks! On a lighter side - If I had one of thouse routers I might be able to load all those images and flash a bit faster :-)
Follow me
Cisco and Juniper can only (currently) route in gigabit speeds.
Other competitors that they will have to deal with: Pluris, IronBridge Networks and Charlotte's Web Networks .
After all, I've never known sales people OR barflys to exaggerate at all.
We had a project that was probably similar in concept, maybe slightly lower throughput. I don't think the claims are that far fetched.
However, getting one chip working is one thing. Getting an entire box is a whole 'nother trick entirely, as I'm sure they will discover.
They are, obviously short on technical details, but I find no particular reason to disbelieve them. There are a lot of "real" tech companies in Montreal (my ex-company had a branch there), and fewer fakes than other places.
$70million won't last you very long without any other source of revenue. If they are lucky and really, really good, they may have a product out in production in 2-3 years.
Another thing is that article is misleading; they really received $12M in funding, and added another $31M in repayable loans from the Canadian government. Again, the numbers quoted in the article are Canadian dollars, not US.
Several terabit router companies have failed (such as Ironbridge ) and others are having problems, a la Avici along with Nexabit.
For more entertainment, read the article and comments in Light Reading.
It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?
They also have an EETimes story Archived and there is this news item from before the dot-com boom went bust.
Other items include this bit saying we don't need petabit routing anyhow (just wait a few years!). I also spotted this job description from some namesless company.
Basically, this job description says to me, "You will invent the products we need so that we can make lots of bucks off your brains". One of those things, go in with eyes open."It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The same thing is happening on this side of the border. LaurelNetworks is another super-startup company, with a lot of capital, with their guns aimed at the "big boys" of network hardware (Cisco, Juniper, etc.). I did some work with Laurel, and even some work with a micro-startup networking company, BlueWave Networks.
:)
I don't think that there's any hoaxing at all going on here. They're legitimate players with some heavy capital backing them. They also have great engineers and some good technology. It may not be enough, however. What it's going to come down to (IMHO) is the willingness of big ISPs and carriers to adopt technology from a new vendor.
Cisco may not have the best equipment, but everyone and their dog worth their salt in this game knows IOS and how to admin it. You can't say the same of any of the new vendor's products.
We've moved beyond the days of "great ideas" and "great products." Internet routing is a mature market in which the biggest obstacle is now overcome the inertia of the entrenched players.
The anology reminds me of Linux vs. MS, but then again, what doesn't?
From Thier site:
.... and that a packet originates in Boston and is transmitted in red light to the next node, if the light isn't the color for that node, So if red was Richmond, NY and Washington would reflect the red light down the line until it gets to Richmond. This way NY and WAS don't have to convert the signal which saves a lot of time and work. Also this allows Boston to talk to Richmond as 1 hop as far as the software is concerned. Similarly a packet transmitted in Amber light might go all the way to Atlanta before being converted to Electrons.
Accelerating the war are the recent advances in ultra-long-haul optics and optical switches, which are making it practical for routers to place packets on destination-based wavelengths that can take them as close as possible to their final destination in the core, thus eliminating intermediate routing hops and unnecessary O-E-O conversions.
I read this as meaning that you have a strand of fiber that runs from say for example Boston, to NY to Washington to Richmond to Charlotte to Atlanta to
Sounds like a good idea to me since it should work on existing fiber. The real question is how hard and expensive is it to start with two nodes and grow from there.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Couple of things...
/24 in class B space, without advertising the /16 also, so the route gets nuked at a border router, as quite a few providers filter based on classfull boundries, or people just not understanding how a traceroute even works, and demanding to speak to a 'routing guru' because their traceroute dies after a certain point due to an ACL (access control list), so they naturally think the web server/mail server, etc they are going too is down, even though it is not.).
1. 90% of the time when you call a large internet service provider, you speak to their frontline support, who address their level 2 support (etc) as 'routing engineers', consider how many people must call them and complain about problems (90% of which are probably caused by stupid things like them advertising a
2. As someone pointed out, number of hops != latency, etc. Most people who are just starting their quest for knowledge in this field tend to confuse the two unfortunately.
Now, while in an ideal network, 99% of things will be done at layer 2, thereby making the total hopcount in your traceroute lower (if your traffic is going through an ATM switch who doesn't know about/care about layer 3 information in an ATM cell, it will obviously not show up as a hop in your trace). The hopcount your traceroute shows doesn't matter, the simple fact that all that has to be done is the header of the ATM cell (the first 5 bytes) is read, and then the cell is forwarded to its proper destination (similar for ethernet, using cut-through switching, etc) doing switching at layer 2, vs. having to read the IP packet's headers to find the destination will provide a noticible decrease in latency in most situations.
You are however correct in that Cisco has many features out there that will greatly increase performance for people. Mind you, there aren't any official 3rd party benchmarks against this (the company the article is referring too) company's products, so we don't know if they are something to laugh at, or really are better then whats out there currently (although I am voting for the laughing part).
Also, in regards to BGP, (heh btw it has quite a bit of overhead, since it uses TCP), while it is pretty much the only good choice for an EGP (external gateway protocol), you will still need an IGP such as OSPF, etc unless you intend to have your router(s) have BGP sessions with the IP's of other routers known via directly connected (or static routes), which would be stupid (except for some situations using static routes in a very small network). Its not like you setup a BGP session with another router, and it 'magically' works, there is quite a bit of traffic engineering involved (how much is dependent on how big your network is), and cooperation among internet service providers (i.e. to set the localpref that is distributed to your IBGP mesh based on certain communities received from a peer, or the other way around, so people can control the path traffic goes back into their network in a better way then padding the route (i.e. adding more AS's to the AS_PATH which chances are wont give you the desired results), or other methods).
BGP isn't really that smart. That's why I make good bucks making it look smart (traffic/load balancing). Asymetric routes aren't a problem really, I don't know why you'd worry about them. The internet and BGP was designed to do that. And I'll take one of UU's "so called" router engineers any day over a government hack.. I'm sure _you_ didn't talk to a real NOC person. And about your string vs mesh fetish: I guess you don't really understand how real world economics plays a part in network design. A non-congested router doesn't add more that 2ms to the path. You're like the guy that wants a non-stop freeway from your house to every desination in the world. Sorry , it ain't goint to happen. If you think that you have a better way to run the net, come to a NANOG meeting and give your ideas a try.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
At TerabitCorp, Alan Huang employed what he calls a Galois Network using many standard off-the-shelf routers to create a fault-tolerant, open platform terabit meta-router with some very cool properties. Not sure if the idea ever flew, though...
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
That is what I was referring to in my comment in a sense. Anyone can build chaos, diversity -- a jungle. Anyone can say "We will make the edges smart and the core dumb!", but the doing is another matter. Such a construction is not efficient, though. History tends to indicate that farming has won out over jungles, that civilization over barbarians, corporations over small buisinesses.
As the demands placed on the network become more stringent in terms of QoS, costs, efficiency -- once the network becomes no longer cutting edge, but boring old infrastructure, it will become ordered and managed to increase efficiency at the cost of diversity. Every frontier is eventually settled because it uses resources more efficiently that way.
Pretending that the core network does not need intelligence allows people to pretend that they can do whatever they want, drop whatever packets they want into the system, and have it work. (In the slightly higher application level, people learned that they could send SPAM to everyone else easily.) The issue is that this is slowly creating an hostile relationship with the core network. Issues with having ports blocked to prevent people from running servers on their connections are symptomatic of this -- the edge and the core are conflicting over what is allowed. (Hint: the core wins unless the edge pays at least the cost of the actual bandwidth used. The core can always cut the connection. If the edges do not cover the costs of the bandwidth, the core goes out of business, and everyone loses (you know, like all those DSL providers...))
Barbarians who have stood at the edges and shouted and screamed that they do not need civilization have always been pushed back by the expansion of civilization. The edges will have to be come civilized and deal with the core network in a civilized fashion, not just run rampant through it -- the core is alread setting up walls and gates on the edges to stop the barbarians: filtering out spoofed source addresses, NAT, firewalls, port blocking, monitors, sniffers, etc. Because the core network is denied any useful information/intelligence about services to make optimizations, because it has to handle *anything*, which is inefficient/expensive, the core network is , unsurprizingly, becoming dumb -- and, surprise, dumb things do not do well in performing a variety of services efficiently, the services and traffic have to be simple and uniform to be handled efficiently by a dumb box. So, the traffic and services are *made* simple -- no web servers for you, bud! We'll forcibly shape your traffic patterns until they are more simple and efficient for us, 'cause we're only a bunch of dumb core guys, right? We can't do anything complex! Why, yes, tech support really is staffed by low-grade morons -- the network is pretty dumb and simple, you know, doesn't take any brains to run!
Ultimately, the barbarians will have to become civilized, the only question is on whose terms, or find a new frontier. If the barbarians are going to want good terms, they are going to have to treat the core with respect -- they will have to have intelligence in the core to communicate with it. For QoS, etc., the edges will have to be able to tell the core what they want, and the core will have to have the intelligence to see if it can manage it, and arrange for the service. And the barbarians better negotiate while they still have power -- if they all get crowded into little reservations of network places with unfiltered services and become a tiny part of the market first without any bargaining power, well...
If the only communication/negotiation between the edge to the core is "Route packet! Route packet! Route packet!" The only reponse the core can have is "Yes" or "No". Allowing for more intelligent negotiation of service allows for compromises and more flexibility. The core can *always* say no.
Murphy's Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law.
As long as we need core networks, routers, interconnect points, etc. those who own them will ultimately have the power to make the rules. And they aren't owned by the IETF, and they aren't owned by the edges.