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Opinions on Alternatives to Cisco Routers?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm currently working on a project that is 'partnered' with Cisco. Despite that they make good routers, the company's relatively large size does not appear to be willing to meeting unique, customized, requirements. So what are your opinions of the alternatives: 3com, Juniper, etc? Anyone had bad/good experience with these companies? Are all their routers really essentially the same? How about comparative performance with totally customized routing solutions via Linux+Zebra or some other open solution?"
sangoma has made t1/e1 cards for some time now with drivers for *bsd and linux. they have just been recently merged into openbsd-current and will get maintained by the openbsd peeps there.
between carp, pf, pfsync, the soon-to-be-a-reality ifstated, and now the sangoma drivers, the question becomes more, why cisco?
Because we're talking about routing today, not routing in 1998. T1 speed traffic can probably be routed without loss by an apple newton that's simultaneously trying to OCR a hand-written journal entry by Christopher Reeve. Throw in virulent windows boxes at full-duplex GigE speeds and you're going to need ASICs for the policy and routing decisions.