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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?"
what could you possibly require that you need cisco to customize their stuff for you? with all the software/hardware coming out of that company, how's it possible that something doesnt quite entirely cover everything you need?
Or at least that's what some would want :) Which would be interesting to see ...
... Theo himself is looking into replacing ciscos with OpenBSD.
...
Anyway, they already have good failover support for their firewall, nice bgpd, support for T1 hardware was recently merged into -current
Something good will come out of it, i'm sure
Methinks you haven't looked at what can be done with a PC these days. I work for a company that provides hardware that front-ends the largest websites in the world, and it's Intel hardware with PCI-X bus support, and PCI-X NIC's. These boxes can drive over 4Gb/s of traffic. How many networks drive that much traffic? The point is that with the right software, the hardware can fly. The hard part is the software. If you do the math, a 33mhz 32 bit PCI bus can handle about 1Gb/s, which if run equal xmit and receive, comes to 512Mb/s. A 64 bit 66mhz comes to about 4Gb/s. A 133Mhz 64 bit PCI bus does 8Gb/s, and gig cards now support this. So, even if you drive four Gig cards at wire speed, you are just reaching the top capacity of a single 133Mhz 64 bit PCI bus. Now consider that higher-end motherboards now have more than one PCI bus that can run at this speed, and a PC can make a very good alternative to a router. Again, the key is the software...
I know of several IT shops that will not allow non Cisco equipment into their infrastructure. Would make it hard (if not impossible) to qualify for those accounts.
Cisco is good, but they're by no means in a class all their own from a performance or capability point of view. Personally, I've found Extreme Networks can often offer considerably higher performance at a price that's a bit lower than Cisco's - and the care and feeding of Extreme's gear is *way* easier than Cisco's, too, which is a cost that you should NOT ignore...
I have nothing against Cisco, but Extreme "gets" performance far more than Cisco - for instance, Extreme's gigabit switches have deeper buffers than Cisco's which is irrelevant for most networking tasks, but shows up big-time when you try to do something serious like, say, storage-over-IP, or a cable head-end: it's just way too easy to overrun Cisco's buffers and wind up with your data all over the floor. Of course, if you ever have to retransmit anything because of this, the huge latency involved in that obliterates any chance of good performance. Extreme's engineers know this, and design their gear accordingly.
I'd suggest giving them a chance as an alternative vendor. (I have no relationship with Extreme, either, except as one pleasantly surprised by the company on several occasions.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last