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BusinessWeek On XORP vs. Cisco
cornfed writes "BusinessWeek is running this article talking about how XORP will take on Cisco's dominance in the router market. The article speculates that XORP could represent the next 'open-source rebellion.' One can only imagine the fallout within the telecommunications industry if an open-source project like this gained traction-- Cisco would not be the only giant to be slain."
Because XORP is more fun to say.
The result of XORP & similar technology will be a decentralization of networks. If you look at a typical enterprise network, the backbone of that network will be a single "enterprise" (ie. expensive) Layer-3 switch from a company like Extreme, Foundry, Cisco or whatever.
Those switches are cost-effective because of the needlessly high cost of low-end equipment.
If supported, flexible & cheap routing becomes a reality, you'll see clouds of cheap-commodity level hardware replace big networking iron... just as Linux displaced Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Go after the big guy first and the others will be afraid to fight. That worked so well in gradeschool
Here is more about XORP (the Extensible Open Router Platform), for those that don't know.
Cisco is the only company with an employment policy that is worse than the one at Intel. Cisco does quarterly performance reviews; they are strictly by the bell (i.e. gaussian) curve. The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.
Worse, Cisco has also demanded that it be allowed to hire foreign engineers from India and China. According to Cisco management, it absolutely needs H-1B engineers in order to be competitive and has continued to hire H-1B engineers, never minding that 80,000 Americans were unemployed in Silicon Valley during the 2001-2003 recession.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
I would think there might or might not be paralells in that to the linux thing. Once upon a time there were big expesive unix computers, today replaced by commonity hardware in most cases, but still hanging on in others. So maybe in future: Once upon the time there was Cisco, today replaced by commonity hardware in most cases, but still hanging on...
go free software.
XORP's first version was released in July, and heavier-duty versions are due in coming years. While it's hardly the first effort to make routing software in an open-source format, it may be the most promising, due to $3 million in funding from high-powered backers such as Intel, Microsoft (MSFT ), and the National Science Foundation.
Sounds a little odd to me..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Cisco is the only company with an employment policy that is worse than the one at Intel. Cisco does quarterly performance reviews; they are strictly by the bell (i.e. gaussian) curve. The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.
Worse, Cisco has also demanded that it be allowed to hire foreign engineers from India and China. According to Cisco management, it absolutely needs H-1B engineers in order to be competitive and has continued to hire H-1B engineers, never minding that 80,000 Americans were unemployed in Silicon Valley during the 2001-2003 recession.
I'm not using MikroTik these days but I have deployed it in the past at Wireless ISPs. I hold the Cisco Certified Network and Design Professional ratings, the Wireless LAN SE and FE certificates, and I'll collect the Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional by the end of the year - I know a bit about IOS and I think MikroTik provides a much better interface than IOS for many things and it definitely gets all over Cisco in the wireless arena.
Take a look at http://www.soekris.com after you get done looking at http://www.mikrotik.com - this is one of my favorite hardware platforms for the OS. Its the same size as a Cisco radio, does a whole lot more, and when you add the MikroTik software its still cheaper than the Cisco product.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
"Cisco uses an operating system called IOS that it built from scratch decades ago."
I thought it was derived from late '80s BSD Unix?
While it's hardly the first effort to make routing software in an open-source format, it may be the most promising, due to $3 million in funding from high-powered backers such as Intel, Microsoft (MSFT ), and the National Science Foundation.
Okay... anyone else here wondering why and how that came about? Why would MS be involved in such a project? Is the licensing such that MS could siphon the code off for its own use? I'd suspect as much... not that it's a bad thing -- on the contrary, it's quite good -- just not the sort of thing I'd expect from them.
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware. Because, you know, I'm sure that businesses of all sizes are *very* anxious to rely on general purpose PC's for their high-performance routing needs.
Don't get me wrong, I think XORP could be usefull in certain applications. I'm currently running Linux on an old Pentium for sharing internet access on my home network, so I understand that for small networks with relatively slow internet connections, general purpose hardware, running routing software, can be usefull.
But I doubt it's going to 'slay the giant'. So much hyperbole in tech journalism these days (oh well, how else are you going to get people to read the article?)
...Timewarp 1997...
You're absolutely correct! What major reasearch lab would ditch their multi-million dollar SGI Origin supercomputing clusters for low cost Lintel hardware?
I can stake my entire enterprise on proven software that costs $15,000+ for a workstation and $300,000+ for a server, or Linux... being a systems programmer for a large company I can say it will never happen.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Production networks can't tolerate down time, or waiting for few admins to hack some code and fix some buggy router. So that XORP might be open source, but it has to be commercialized as well.
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
I'd fire you just for the arrogance of using the word never.
You are convoluted if you think billion dollar companies are going to switch...
We're having convulsions? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Lets see, i can stake my entire enterprise on equipment and software which is proven and in place everywhere with proper support and what not in place, or Xorp... being a network engineer for a large company I can say it will never happen.
Right. Because we all know that no company has ever adopted open source programs before like, say, Linux.
Every big company starts out as a small company. And small companies are much more willing to try out these cheap new technologies.
Cisco doesn't have to worry about today's F500 companies dropping it for XORP... it has to worry about *tomorrow's* F500 companies never even considering Cisco.
You are talking about servers which are all commodity grade these days anyway. Lets put our routing infrastructure on such low grade crap hardware and when the bottom line gets affected due to all kinds of outages and crappy *nix admins, then we shall see how this is going to take down Cisco. No matter what all of the open source pundits say, networking hardware will remain mostly the way it is now because IT folks in big business will not buy into putting their organizations at risk by using xorp.
Even not being a network engineer for a large company, I can be sure that even the billion dollar babies can change. Closed Unices were as proven as anything and now we have the free ones. I'm not telling what will happen. It's just that given enough time, the big players can also experiment with pretty much anything.
If all you're looking for is a simple router to run a routing protocol and move traffic around, XORP is probably great.
But Cisco routers (and Nortel, and Juniper) do way more than just route. VoIP gateway services, legacy protocol support, dial, VPN, advanced access control, etc.
Yes, Linux does lots of these things, but XORP doesn't do many of them (yet).
Cisco is popular because it's a dedicated reliable platform that does all these things with a single network-centric OS interface, without having to go to an underlying OS to do other things.
It's similar to the TiVo/MythTV debates... sure you can do a lot of the same things and even more with MythTV that you can do with TiVo, but some people just want a box they can plug in and configure quickly. Some people want to "roll their own", but that's only Slashdot types, most normal people don't want to be bothered.
It's not surprising that a Berkeley CS researcher thinks his open source project can "slay Cisco", though Ghosh never says anything like that in the article. It might not even be surprising when a Business Week reporter says something so naive, but it is disappointing. Even Linux isn't slaying anyone - it's apple and oranges (or maybe apples and ciscos): XORP might be comparable to Cisco's IOS router operating system, but XORP is hardly comparable to Cisco itself. If XORP works out, and becomes an effective competitor with IOS at any level, Cisco and its actual competitors will just start selling it, bundled with the support, marketing and corporate accountability that people buy when they buy "Cisco". Now if only the BizWeek reporter, Alex Salkever, had realized the compelling story here is Microsoft's funding a million-dollar routing project, and releasing the source as its central development strategy. That would make the Slashdot front page, too, without making Salkever famous for spreading Fearless Certainty, Undoubtedly (FC-U, (TM)).
--
make install -not war
You mean the stuff they got when they bought Linksys? That hardware is completely irrelevant to this discussion, because XORP is intended to replace the high-end cisco equipment, and the stuff they bought from linksys didn't even compete with their own products, with one or two limited exceptions like cisco's DOCSIS cable modem. I don't even know if the linksys cable modem runs linux.
It does seem highly likely that we will see commoditization of the router market. It makes more sense to provide a chassis that takes full-length PCI cards than to require special cards which use a PCI interface anyway. PCI-E is the logical choice since it provides (potentially) more bandwidth than even PCI-X and you could use a wonky form factor if you wanted to, for example blade-type cards that have their connector on the back instead of the bottom. Even using an ordinary rackmount PC form factor, with just 66MHz/64 bit PCI, you could equal or surpass the performance of a cisco router with COTS hardware, provided you had the right software to run it all. Using 64 bit processors over the 32 bit ones found in most networking gear means being able to process IPv6 addresses significantly faster, and most of those systems do not have much processing power because they are proprietary and it's expensive to implement. PC processors are cheap and reference designs are readily available. However, we will need new chipset designs to provide sufficient bus bandwidth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
. . . but just failed to contribute their source mods back to the community. (I seem to recall them offering vanilla kernel source)
A company that can exploit people (kernel contributors) and not feel retribution has a competitive advantage over people who leverage others work and give back too.
Lets put our routing infrastructure on such low grade crap hardware...
Woah, woah, woah! How can you say that? Do YOU own anything form XORP?
I support your sentiment. Further, their alleged demands (evidence please?) would seem to illustrate a blatant abuse of the H1-B program. The purpose is supposed to be so that local companies can gain access to skills from other sources when they aren't available here, not so a company can get them cheaper -- that's actually illegal isn't it? If they are officially citing that as the reason for the need, then I think some sort of legal action should be taken against them.
In fact, I don't know why a group of professionals hasn't banded together to collect information and evidence from H1-B abusers and had them hauled into court over it. I'd be willing to bet if such an organization were formed there would be no shortage of donations and a lot more jobs in the U.S. would be filled by locals.
We all know about Soekris, and your alphabet soup paper credentials don't mean squat.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yes this is horrible because all 80,000 of these Americans deeply wanted to work for Cisco and oddly enough all 80,000 of them were perfectly qualified to do so... Also what the parent forgot to mention is that all 80,000 of them had all available Cisco certs.. holy crap cisco boned america on this one...
Get a clue I'm tired of fools using stats like this to claim companies dont need H-1B engineers... You simply dont have any idea how complex the workforce actually is, why dont you come back to the real world, being in touch with reality results in making yourself look like less of an ass..
FTA: "I don't see open-source routing replacing high-end routers in enterprise or service provider networks," said Dave Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group. "But in the real low end, like in the D-Link and Linksys category of product, free software could be very useful."
Useful, yes. But to how many? I'm not sure that Joe Sixpack could configure a router through a command line. In order to compete with Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link, they will also have to include a real stateful firewall and DynDNS support (which is something that is being included in most retail firewalls now).
Also, if you have to setup a dedicated PC to run this, your average small business or home user isn't going to be interested when they can go to the local superstore and pickup a $59 Linksys that's ready to go, quiet, and small. Unfortunately, this software will not make it to the point where it would be a threat to any appliance-based router builder.
in other words a project like say... Asterisk?
We already have 5+ HUGE (100k+ DIDs) companies running it and raving about it... what more do you need?
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
XORP.ORG
I highly doubt that XORP will be able to slain Cisco at all. When you consider all of the backbones and how many system / internet technologies created by Cisco are being used. I would say they control a easy 80% of the networking market in general. If XORP is trying to slain Cisco then they'll be slaying the networking in general. Although I like the idea of it being open source, which could enable more users to be involved in the development of new and future innovations, better bug testing and what not. For now I'll stick to CISCO, but will montior XORP's progress.
May
I heard that somewhere before.... oh yeah....
"if you think billion dollar companies are going to switch to some piece of shit Personal Computer PLatform instead of the proven and functional Mainfraimes from IBM. Lets see, i can stake my entire enterprise on equipment and software which is proven and in place everywhere with proper support and what not in place, or personal computers being a Systems Admin for a large company I can say it will never happen."
He certianly did not work here long after we started switching to PC's on the desktops.
Management mentioning something about being inflexible and unwilling to update his skillset to match changes in the industry was the reasons for firing him.
Ya its too bad that will never happen either.
Whatever. I'm sick of Silicon Valley types whining about losing their overpaid jobs to people willing to work hard for less money. Why don't you form your own union if you think you're entitled to a job without having to work hard?
I know lots of people that hopped around different tech companies, getting raises, bonuses, and options every step. Now they all have crappy jobs or no jobs, while I have the same stable well-paying career I've had for years and now make more money than most of them.
I don't see what's wrong with firing underperformers or looking to other countries for talent. Just because there's people here that are unemployed doesn't mean they're ANY GOOD. Most people in this industry are morons.
Put your routing infrastructure on cheap commodity embedded hardware. The unreliable parts of cheap hardware are disks, fans and the like. So you use embedded components without moving parts and redundancy, you have the reliability of Cisco for 1/10th of the price.
4 50
Hell, even without redundancy, cheap equipment is often reliable... We have $29 netgear access points that have uptimes in excess of 18 months.
Read the Google filesystem paper:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=945
Google designed a massive enterprise storage solution for their needs based on crap hardware that is not only more likely to fail, but <i>expected</i> to fail.
The same can and will be done for networks.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
* MSFT funds a LOT of companies and projects...not all of them get mentioned on Slashdot.
* If the project takes off, why wouldn't IBM/MSFT start making cheap hardware to run the open source software on?
Xorp may be fine for low-end applications, where the cost of hardware is more important than the cost of support and uptime.
But, for any relatively complex network, the tech support offerings of a big player like Cisco becomes very important. And, if they have high performance requirements, the custom hardware in a Cisco or Juniper box is pretty tough to compete with on a general purpose platform.
Even at the low end, it's tough to compete with a Linksys/Cisco box doing basic routing functions. In terms of size, power usage, and noise, a small embedded router box is a much better option than a clunky x86 box running xorp.
Last time I looked, none of the open hardware project had done well. When you think about it, any company that is going to build a high quality 96 port ethernet adapter for a PC with hardware to accelerate security, qos and forwarding is going to end up charging a lot of money for it. Then layer in software customization and support and you look just like any other Cisco competitor.
the moral of the story is... OPEN SOURCE OR DIE, CAPTIALIST PIG-DOGS!!!! if you get my drift... ;)
Working in a Cisco based shop, I can certainly appreciate the need for such a product. I look forward to it.
The only problem I have with the article however is its definition of a switch.
The article states: "Switches determine the most efficient path for everything from streaming videos to e-mails to instant messages." It is not correct, switches are not designed to make such determinations.
The Webopedia says:
(swich) (n.) (1) In networks, a device that filters and forwards packets between LAN segments. Switches operate at the data link layer (layer 2) and sometimes the network layer (layer 3) of the OSI Reference Model and therefore support any packet protocol. LANs that use switches to join segments are called switched LANs or, in the case of Ethernet networks, switched Ethernet LANs.
While a router:
(rowter) (n.) A device that forwards data packets along networks. A router is connected to at least two networks, commonly two LANs or WANs or a LAN and its ISPs network. Routers are located at gateways, the places where two or more networks connect. Routers use headers and forwarding tables to determine the best path for forwarding the packets, and they use protocols such as ICMP to communicate with each other and configure the best route between any two hosts.
Such a misuse of terms, particularly from such a respected national magazine, certainly does not help those of us who have to communicate with the non-technical on a regular basis.
"The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all." St. Oran
I too work for a Fortune 500 corporation and I can say with complete certainity that it would take at least 10+ years of proven success by Xorp before we would even consider using it out on the edge of our network, let alone the core. Cisco's IOS is cheap compared to its hardware, and I doubt that Xorp is going to build the chassis and cards to power their OSS routing platform. Plus, are they going to give me 356x24x4 hardware and software support almost anywhere on the face of the planet? I think not.
Routers used by large companies are very specialized pieces of equipmnet (Cisco 7200, 7500, 12000GSR, etc.) and can not be replicated using cheap off the shelf parts. I doubt that Cisco or Juniper is going to let you replace their bootloaders and operating systems and still provide you with a service contract. And service contracts are the life blood for Enterprise networking customers. Unless Cisco or Juniper come out and embrace Xorp like IBM did Linux, then Xorp will not find any Enterprise customers for their router software.
Besides getting mention in a mainstream publication, is there much new about the ability to route using open source software?
As for commodity hardware - besides Ethernet, you're not going to find much that's really commodity about line cards like are used in high-end routers. PCI/PCI-X OC-3/OC-12/OC-48 "NICs" aren't exactly commodity.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I, for one, welcome our new XORP overlords!
Of those 80,000 Americans I'd bet a good number of them cared less where they'd work after endless months of unemployment and cared more about having a job in the field, period. As for Cisco certs.. which makes more sense: bringing an Engineer in from overseas or training one that's already living here?
I think both of you raise some valid points but I think the truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle.
Xorp may find a few places here and there, but they will never take over cisco. people pay for the name and support, i think most people agree that open source support is ok, but mission critical acceptable? i think not. i do like the idea of an open source router and look forward to testing with it, but thats about it.
2cents
The biggest news here is perhaps not that there is an effort to create open source routing software, but that such an effort is backed by Microsoft.
XORP has a great idea, but they are several years late to the party. Apparently, NSF, Intel and its other backers have failed to learn from the dot-bomb era: you can't build a successful business on the backs of a product you're giving away at no charge. Do they plan to make it up on volume? :-)
Linux enthusiasts ought to look toward more commercial companies, such as ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com/) who has been in business 10 years, and building Linux routers for 7. Their corporate profile says they have 30K units in the field.
MontaVista (http://www.montavista.com/) has an embedded OS for PPC and ARM that would provide something more extensible and functional than XORP.
Heck, even Technologic Systems (http://www.embeddedarm.com/) has more mature, embedded products than XORP.
XORP is a great idea--but you're better off going with companies that have already proven themselves in the market and have mature products.
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device that would provide me with 16 GE interface per blade, a crypto accelerator, an optional firewall module and whatever else cisco has up their sleeve for the 6500 series? IOS isn't what you pay for when you buy a router, Cisco is a hardware company.
Don't forget that since XORP is under a BSD-style license, Microsoft can embrace-and-extend and sell a version incompatible with everyone else's. :)
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I for one, welcome our new XORP overlords.
Contributing to "Judgement Day" one line of
There is NO way software routing can compare to processing packets in hardware. The Linux kernel wasn't designed for this and has problems when faced with a large number of packets. I'll reference the work done by Luca Deri at NTOP.org and his pfring mod. Unless we start seeing specialized open source hardware I don't think Cisco will feel threatened in the least.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
That a bunch of general purpose commodity hardware is going to replace their highly engineered, specialized hardware.
Yes, and SGI probably never thought that PC hardware would drive them out of business either.
Also, only a small core needs to be high performance; hardware vendors can take this kind of open platform, add a small piece of specialized hardware and custom software, and save themselves a boatload of development effort, and their customers a lot of training costs.
Yeah, but I'm not sure it's always good, I mean, what would you think if someone said your data was being "XORPed?"
It really sounds like some 50s ray gun sound effect to me.
[ Dr. Z has just completed his Doomsday Device, is about to conquer the world from his evil 50s sci-fi lab. Our hero, Spacerogue, enters while Dr. Z is gloating. ]
Dr. Z: And now, as I press the Big Red Button on the Doomsday Device, the entire world shall feel my wrath. Mwahahahahahahahahahahah!
Spacerogue: Not so fast, Dr. Z, I have my trusty Five-Dimensional Beam Zapper!
Dr. Z: Not now! I was so close!
*XORP*
[ Cue cheesy 50s sci-fi movie ending, world saved, etc. ]
- hardware
- that is reliable
- hot-pluggable
- redundant (spare powersupplies, etc)
- and routing software (that's where XORP fits), and
- warranty
- support
- documentation and support materials
- training
- certification / qualifications
- network design / professional services consultancy
- brand recognition
- big reference sites, and a proven track record
- marketing assistance (powered by... kind of stuff)
- accountability
Some of these areas are a real opportunity for third parties, once XORP gets to be a solid product, but the image, brand, reputation, etc will be hard to overcome in the short to medium term. In the longer term, the Linux model shows it is possible (though it's hardly inevitable - it's not the only open router free cisco type project, after all).Still, the marketing side matters less in a tech-savvy small/medium enterprise, or in a consultancy operation. It might get a start there, or in a more cost-sensitive environment.
And open source can even be argued to confer security advantages. It could get interesting...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
How about reading at xorp.org, instead of just news stories that talk about xorp?
Now admittedly, if they didn't get -any- competent applicants, it might be acceptable to hire an H1B here or there, but those are, by far, the exception rather than the rule, and should be limited to senior engineering positions and only in very small companies. Larger companies, upon failing to find someone qualified for a senior position, should be able to promote someone from within to a senior position and hire someone into a junior position---someone who doesn't require an H1B. There are plenty of new college graduates in the valley looking for work.
Sorry, but there are far too many tech employees unemployed in the valley for your argument to hold weight. Companies in the valley should be utterly fined into oblivion if they are hiring H1B engineers right now in any significant quantity. As to whether Cisco is or not, I have no idea.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This reminds me of winroute. Damn good IP routing software on the PC. Quite frankly I have never seen a switch IOS smarter than a full operating system. So it doesn't surprise me if XORP becomes a super success in the future.
"Its goal is to provide a free open-source software product that will route data through computer networks using cheap hardware and microprocessors from the likes of Intel."
commodity nics != the high end specialized I/O in cisco gear
I'm afraid they will and you'll be left trying to justify your expensive service contracts to the board.
I'm sure Cisco owns several software patents on their switches and routers which they will not hesitate to bring to bear against any open competition.
forgot to mention is that all 80,000 of them had all available Cisco certs
A significant number of the people who go to work for cisco in technical capacities are programmers, and don't necessarily have cisco certs. The Cisco Certs are for people setting up equipment, not coding. The truth is, we don't know either way.
Instead of resorting to name-calling, why not suggest a way to determing whether or not H-1Bs actually deprive US citizens of technical jobs, or at least point to someplace that has.
Of those 80,000 Americans I'd bet a good number of them cared less where they'd work after endless months of unemployment and cared more about having a job in the field, period.
What part of "perfectly qualified" don't you get? It's likely that only a small percentage of those unemployed IT folks actually have the background that Cisco is looking for.
As for Cisco certs.. which makes more sense: bringing an Engineer in from overseas or training one that's already living here?
Okay, let's put this in perspective. You can either: 1) spend $20,000 to educate someone, who may either come out underqualified, or worse yet *leave*, or 2) spend $20,000 to bring someone from overseas who already has the necessary qualifications, what would *you* do?
This could get interesting if H/W manufacturers eventually start producing specialized hardware to run XORP.
The issue right now is that higher end router gear runs on specialized hardware like ASICS etc. You can not get that kind of performance from general use CPUs...
If you think that every division fires the bottom 10% every quarter you are insane. Yes divisions that are losing money generally fire slacker employees, and they justify it with the "it's company policy" line, but that doesn't mean that Cisco has a 40% annual turnover rate! Hell when the big round of layoffs happened they gave everyone 6 months severance and paid medical for 6 months! Cisco hires the best and the brightest from around the world, as well the should since they are a global company. I worked with people in Taiwan, Australia, Germany, etc while there, if they can't bring those workers here they'll just move the work to somewhere where they CAN get the talent to. Cisco pays better than competitive wages so it's not like they are bringing in sweatshop labor like some H-1B employers, they are using the program for exactly what it was designed for, to bring in talented people from around the world to work on specialized projects for a limited amount of time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
H-1Bs; taking flak for the Mythical American Worker since 1997.
Ultimatly, this is off-topic to the XORP discussion, but please get your facts straight. Cisco's HR policy is to "Actively manage out the bottom 5%" not the 10% you state. And anyone caught in that has the option of going on a form of probation to get themselves out of thet bottom 5%.
The sad part of the policy is that it's per department. So if someone is in one of the higher flying departments, they could be the equilivant of a top performer in another department and still get managed out because they were in the bottom 5% of their department.
We won't go into the 80K out of work. It's not relevant.
My guess is the Nazgul got you during the Big Purge.
Cheers,
I would think that other router vendors would be hurt first. The most common reason I read that people buy non-Cisco equipment is cost. If an open-source router works well, it will eat away at the market share of the cheapest vendors first. This could actually help Cisco fight off the competition.
Great so Cisco is supposed to jump at hiring someone who after months of failure says well I guess Cisco is alright, ill try there, over a very enthusiastic H-1B that pushed really really hard to get an interview and a chance at Cisco because it was their first choice? Im assuming you think this is the case because well hiring an American even though he had little real interest in working in cisco is infinitely better than hiring a foreigner..
As for Cisco certs.. which makes more sense: bringing an Engineer in from overseas or training one that's already living here?
All of this hinges on the fact that these Americans obviously did not look to Cisco as there first choice. If I'm making a decision about hiring someone especially when we are talking about a long term investment in training I'm looking for someone who will stay long enough for it to pay off. Sorry but your American who can't find the job they want so they apply with me looks a whole lot less attractive than a H-1B trying his hardest to work for Cisco not because he needs a job to feed himself but just because its Cisco...
Desire and drive to work at a place is probably the most underestimated factor in getting hired. Go to a job interview and say to the interviewer, well its a job, i dont want to be here i just need to feed myself. see how far that gets you..
"Yes, and SGI probably never thought that PC hardware would drive them out of business either."
Cheap hardware didn't drive them out of their market (they're still in business). They're own fuck-ups (sabotage?) did that well enough.
"Also, only a small core needs to be high performance; hardware vendors can take this kind of open platform, add a small piece of specialized hardware and custom software, and save themselves a boatload of development effort, and their customers a lot of training costs."
And with up and coming networks like Internet 2. That core will be around for years.
My own view on this is that it takes far longer to find someone who is "perfectly qualified" than to mold such a person from a qualified Engineer. For Cisco to know these candidates don't exist domestically they had to have the positions open for some time, right? How much has it cost them to leave the position open that long before hiring from overseas?
I'd bet for less money they could've hired a person with sound Engineering skills that could've picked up the material in the time they wasted looking for Mr/Ms Perfect who may or may not exist.
I never understood this insistance on "perfectly qualified".
H1B is close to servant status, IMO.
If cisco needs them so bad, they need to go open a branch in India.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
you've obviously never worked for a proper enterprise.
I doubt anyone goes into an interview and announces to the hiring manager that the company is a "second choice". I also doubt that their resume says as much. Yes, anyone who makes it obvious they don't wish to be employed by a company deserves not to get hired. I don't disagree with that but I doubt that happens very often unless there's a group of people that are comfortable living off the laughable money that unemployment security usually provides.
I don't think you can easily guage "real interest in working in company x". It's a matter of a choice between hiring an American Engineer who has a strong resume but not the exact skillset or considering international candidates who need to b e relocated but perhaps have the desired skillset. If the American can be brought up to speed quick enough then yes, I believe they deserve the job first. I don't wish to see my neighbors living on the streets and I don't understand what's wrong with that.
This looks an aweful lot like something I have been using for almost 2 years now, Freesco. This is a floppy based router i'm sure all you /.'ers already know about.
the level of trust a purchaser must have in their router investment is even higher than the bar for their OS. It is embedded equipment from the perspective of most users, akin to telco equipment and, of course, connected to and perforce compatible with telco equipment. The rowdy world of open source products and solutions does not yet command that level of respect in any market...even where we know, for instance, some open source operating systems having long track records of superior security and performance vs dominant proprietary alternatives. I am not promoting this kind of thinking as wisdom, mind you, just observing that the market thinks this way.
To look at this contrasting of OS market vs router market from a different perspective, consider whether Cisco's involvement in standards bodies has been as self-promoting as Microsofts. Would XORP have any goodwill or underdog benefit vis-a-vis Cisco stemming from Cisco being known for trying to rewrite the rules for its exclusive benefit? The technical community knows Microsoft for not playing fair and so looks askance at many of the "solutions" they pose or looks more favorably at the alternatives.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
They support their stuff. On more than on occasion, I've seen them come out with a fix a real problem, after you tell them about it. They actually provide a service of substance to their customers. Try calling Msoft and complaining about explorer bugs.
What's more, the COMBO family of NICs is free hardware (speech, not beer). The desing is open.
Funny, I WANT to work for a company that fires people...especially "The 10 percenters"!
They have. Any more suggestions?
What, exactly, gives you idiots the idea that you're entitled to special consideration for a job because you were born on a particular side of a line on a map, anyway?
The problem with the H-1B folks is that their visas are at the mercy of their employer. A resident alien is free to change employers, while the H-1B has 60 days to leave the country once he becauses unemployed.
Companies like Intel & Cisco love H-1B's, because they be completely and utterly exploited, and nobody gives a shit. They don't vote, can't quit and don't make alot of money.
Personally, I have no problem with Indian guest workers or Mexican illegals. My family came here from Ireland only two generations ago.
The problem that I have is that food & technology companies have prevent meaningful reform or enforcement of immigration laws to allow themselves to import a cheap & exploitable workforce.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
People are already working on using XORP as the control plane for high-speed network processors. This would lower the barrier to entry in the high-end router market, since both the network processors and XORP are off-the-shelf.
> Go after the big guy first and the others will be afraid to fight. That worked so well in gradeschool.
Yeah, right.
Considering the source (Anonymous Coward, for Christ's sake!), this not only is not insightful, it is also quite incredulous.
Now about these XO guys: "The average data rate these business sites support is less than 200 kilobytes per second, and they control that with gear that commonly costs thousands of dollars."
That illustrates the idea that businesses do NOT care about KBps (otherwise they would have been routing en masse using Windows or Linux already) but a bunch of other features which the XO guys will take forever to catch up on. And probably the key stuff is protected by patents anyway.
Small companies and poor bastards - sure, I use Linux for routing myself. But if you're a big company and have millions of dollars made (or lost) every day based on good functioning of VOIP or iSCSI service - you can't be serious to do that on non-Tier 1 vendor's hardware. So yea, in couple of years the XO guys will kill off deadbeat low-end vendors, but hitting on the schoolyard bully... Good luck with that!
Last time I checked, mySQL wasn't competing with Oracle head-to-head.
There was that promising Zebra project - whatever happened to that one?
I find it worrisome that just as Linux and OSS are gaining support from the big corporations, there are projects that are trying to take away their market share. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that we are at a critical point here with regards to patent law.
From the XORP FAQ:
Software forwarding plane limits forwarding rate
For small workplace settings / lan routing where a little added latency and limited bandwidth is not an issue this is a great solution and companies like cisco will probably see their market share eroded a bit.
However, backbone routing, especially anything with packet shaping, is not going to be software only driven for a while simply because the customized ICUs in routers are so much better at this then commoditiy hardware.
I would like to point out that most Cisco Kit is actually running IOS off an embedded PPC CPU.
There was even a project to run Linux on most Cisco routers and switches at one time.
Currently you will see a large majority of Cisco's high end equipment moving to commodity hardware running linux.
Examples of this are the Cisco Content Engine line are embeded linux machines. They are effectively a linux box running a proxy server (isn't squid, but has much of the same functionality).
http://www.mcvax.org/~koen/uClinux-cisco2500/
Only company that I know of right now to actually impliment routing and switching in an ASIC is Nortel. Cisco is all general CPU running IOS which is how you get new features in same old hardware with IOS upgrades.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
We could go back and forth all day without convincing eachother but personally I think we shouldn't limit the number of foreign workers and immigrants and we should make naturalization much much easier. (I was born in America by the way before I get accused of anything) Getting Americans hired over foreigners starts in schools, if we want Americans to be hired lets at least make there education and oppurtunities better to give them an advantage instead of this artificial advantage of limiting immigrants which does nothing but make it harder for companies to find acceptable candidates.
Lets face it, the reason why Americans are unemployed isnt because companies are hiring more foreigners. Its because Americans are becoming less marketable to said companies. Why is that, a number of reasons but mainly the piss poor quality of our education system.
Cygnus did well providing support for open source software. Perhaps XORPgnus could fill a similar niche?
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
Am I missing the newest features that are not available. BGP (OpenBSD) OSPF (FreeBSD) I must be missing CARP or the redundancy features, but why not just contribute to the BSD's instead of starting your own fork?
The first time I read this I saw "gradschool" not "gradeschool" and thought, yup, how true.
As someone that has designed, built and run a nation wide backbone, I can say I would not be using this anytime soon. It is not that it is not good software, but the hardware it runs on. One of the things in running a network is the uptime and how simple the hardware is. The less moving parts the better. The more appliance like the device the better (so CacheFlow over Squid on a server). Also there is the bandwidth issue. Most PC hardware cannot handle the amount of traffic that you will see on a main router because the PCI bus is just not up to it. I would love to see a PC that can route 5 GigE's at wire speed. The bus would be the limiting factor. Most routers have slow CPU's (83-300Mhz PPC). They do not need them. The ASICs handle the traffic flow.
Now, I will say that I have used FreeBSD boxen in the past with a Sangoma T1 card and a PCI NIC for end routers for networks. Never ran a routing protocal on it. Just default routed it. It would be intresting to see this software on a box with maybe 2 T1s and a PCI NIC running BGP for a medium size biz office.
Just my 2 cents.
Oh, for those that made the comment about "Well in 1997 no one thought linux....". Its not the same. Linux works because it is a server product. At the end of the day, it does not matter if you run Windows (OK it does but..) or Linux on a server. It matters how you build the server (RAID, CPU, ECC RAM, etc.). That being said, if you look at the highend IBM Linux stuff it is still on the mainframe type hardware (S/390) or a cluster.
4# Is XORP in competition with the commerical router vendors?
XORP is primarily a research project. We're not competing with router vendors, we're interested in facilitating routing research - providing researchers with a platform where they can try out routing ideas. The code is open source since it's hard to help the research community without providing the source code.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
there is other routing software alternatives, such us, Zebra, bird, openbgpd and quagga (fork from Zebra).
I find guagga stable and good replacement for some SOHO Cisco equipment, but nothing else.
The article should also address the new opportunities that arise. For example, a smart vendor could develop XORP optimised hardware platform. What this would mean is that you have the choice of:
1. free open source XORP you can run on commodity hardware, and the price is good, but the performance isn't so good;
2. free open source XORP bundled with high performance hardware, using, say, custom packet processing silicon, etc: the performance good, but the price higher.
Everyone gets to win: the hackers and low-budget market gets a fantastic software product, that is continually evolving, and the high end market gets high performance, and leverage off the low cost and community developed software itself.
Other posters have pointed out that Cisco is not just about "the product", it's about "the services". This means that Cisco could pull a Sun (e.g. open up IOS and concentrate on hardware and service delivery), or start to offer its own XORP solutions, also building upon its hardware and service delivery expertise.
The product is far from causing Cisco any problems at the moment. The good analogy is MySQL: it effectively puts low scale SQL commercial databases out of business, but the feature set, performance and other issues are not yet mature enough for it to act as a replacement for Oracle in a commercial environment. I work on a 24/7 multiple Oracle mission critical product: moving from Solaris to Linux as the platform is happening now, but only a fool would suggest we should move from Oracle to MySQL. However, in 5-10 years time, MySQL may actually present a viable alternative.
Stay tuned!
(disclaimer: my analogies are hand waving, so I might be slightly off the ball on a few points, but that should not detract from the overall gist of the message).
.... if you take a closer look at the xorp architecture you will see that there is a forwarding engine abstraction which abstracts away the under lying os / hardware. There is nothing to stop you using a different underlying ASIC or some other dedicated forwarding plane, you just need to port the fea to the new hardware.
another possibily neat use of xorp would be as distributed router, but that is just a random idea.
...4 or 5 years ago.
That sure is a good way to motivate schools and students to work hard on teaching and learning computer science: drive salaries down into the gutter with an infinite supply of cheap immigrant labor.
They already had some functions there when I was with Cisco a few years back.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Shenanigans!
If they fire 10% of their workforce every quarter then they would have a nearly 40%/year turnover rate simply from the firings. No way.
Or do you mean that the curve puts 0.1% of employees in the bottom 10% of the curve?
Today, however, the story is different. In particular, using an inexpensive small form-factory PC (especially one with no moving parts, even a fan), you can have a router for $500 that outperforms a Cisco router costing ten times as much -- and has more features!
MikroTik RouterOS has replaced Cisco as the routing core for my network here in Honduras, where price is much more important than it was back in the States. It handles peer-to-peer throttling, per-IP bandwidth management, MRTG support, nice GUI and command-line interfaces, cool scripting language, and includes all the cool stuff that Cisco does -- policy-based routing, OSPF, various queueing strategies, etc.
New-hire engineering training, called "Engineering Bootcamp," contained material from the certs, so engineers could set up boxes for dev and test and have a basic understanding of IOS.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
And if it is done, it will be a closed solution, much like Google. I don't see Google's solution up on Sourceforge and I doubt I will any time soon.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/01/1 721204
Why not look at is in driving wages up in the countries these people come from. US monopoly on high wages has to end at some point with globalization.
the problem is that computer science is so diluted in our schools because our younger children don't learn math properly. Colleges started dropping some of the Math requiremetns for CS because of this, because there students couldnt handle the classes. But instead the norm is to shove these kids along wihtout having proper math and critical thinking skills.
Read The deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt...
There are many organizations already doing this with FreeBSD today. It is also interesting to note that Juniper's JunO/S is based on FreeBSD.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The first router I managed was a white-box 386 running PC-Route across three ISA, thin-net cards. How did it compare to a Cisco AGS+? Badly, but it was cheap and got the job done for routing three underused 10 Mb/s subnets. Am I about to trade my 6506 in for an Opteron with multiple NIC's? Not a chance.
IMHO, XORP's challenge will be that the available buses in commodity PC's are not fast enough for multiple Gb/s ethernet if any of them are at more than 50% usage. Do the math; PCI-E can't move the bits around fast enough. Sure, higher speed PCI-E will be able to once it's beyond vaporware. However 10 Gb Ethernet is already available which ramps the problem up again. Where XORP may play a real role is in allowing new companies to focus on building specialized hardware without having to write the OS from scratch.
Note to those comparing this to the impact of x86/Linux on Unix vendors: Linux would never have taken off if Intel had not been in a position to pour R&D money into their chip development. SGI fell when a desktop PC with an nVidia card was faster at rendering (using Windows NT 4!) than anything SGI sold for less than $100k; the VR lab I worked with cut over in 1998 based entirely on cost. Almost all of the advantages of the various 64-bit RISC processors (the notable exception is memory addressing beyond 4 GB) collapsed in front of the sheer clock-speed advantage provided by P6 and Athlon processors. For Cisco to fall to commodity hardware and FOSS a similar process would have to occur. Someone would have to fund the hardware R&D to create a commodity, high-speed bus and get the chipset manufacturers to adopt it.
I was mostly responding to the current state of affairs, and the article, which mentioned using a PC with two NICs. Using Xorp as a replacement for IOS, in hardware optimized for routing certainly could be a cisco-killer combo, I agree. If someone could get the hardware reliable enough and fast enough. And actually cheaper than Cisco at that point. While providing similar levels of support.
It's unlikely that any *one* company could do all that and end up cheaper than Cisco. However, if you can build an *industry* around Xorp, then yeah I could see some real action happening around Xorp.
Kind of like Apple vs. PC. Most people won't argue that Apple doesn't have great hardware, and software, and support. But, because the PC industry is made up of orders of magnitude more companies than the Apple industry (which is fundamentally Apple and a relatively small number of partners, which are focused on a proprietary solution, vs. the PC industry, which is an open platform with seemingly countless vendors developing stuff for it), you get a *lot* of development effort around it, and very competitive prices.
I suppose Cisco could become the Apple of the router industry, if Xorp becomes the software core of an open routing hardware industry.
I never understood this insistance on "perfectly qualified".
It's cost minimization, the lazy way.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
My own view on this is that it takes far longer to find someone who is "perfectly qualified" than to mold such a person from a qualified Engineer.
And I disagree. In the areas Cisco works in, experience is the key above all, and training comes a very close second. So, given the choice between someone already trained in the field versus someone untrained, *why* would you pick the latter just because they're from the US?
Moreover, there is more than just the expense of training the person. You also need available manpower to mentor the person until they're able to function on their own. Thus, you end up using a valuable, senior resource in order to bring an unseasoned engineer up to speed, instead of dropping in an already experience individual who can simply pick up a ball and run with it.
I'd bet for less money they could've hired a person with sound Engineering skills that could've picked up the material in the time they wasted looking for Mr/Ms Perfect who may or may not exist.
And you're still not getting this point:
spend $20,000 to educate someone, who may either come out underqualified, or worse yet *leave*
This is a *significant risk*. If the person comes out unqualified, you're stuck with someone in whom you've sunk serious cash, but is still not useful to you. And the second case is even worse! One of the biggests risks for a company, regarding training, is that the company will train the candidate, and that person will then take off because they either got into the deal just to get the free training, after which they planned to bail, or alternatively, with the fresh new training they have, they got a sweet deal from another company.
Why? (1) There is no reason a reasonable x86 or (if you like) PowerPC 970 couldn't keep up with a T1 or T3 speed connection (1.5Mb or 45Mb); even when performing some level of deep packet inspection. (2) Commodity machines are "lying around" and may be easier to procure (and manage) then requiring a specialized solution. (3) It's controllable, readable, and will likely have many of the characteristics of open source that we all enjoy (patches appear quickly, etc.)
While this is well and good, there are reasons why XORP will not achieve the same success as Linux when replacing the incumbent: (A) There are hardware requirements beyond $0 to use XORP (and the incremental purchase cost of Linux over Windows is at most $0). The point is, if you don't purchase the router, you need to purchase a computer. With branch office routers at $1000 or so anyway, can you really configure a machine to compete with a dedicated solution? (B) You just CAN'T take out the high-end, high-value part of the routing infrastructure with any commodity PC. First of all, the darn thing isn't nearly big enough to handle all the connections (core routers can be multiple racks). Nor is the bus fast enough to handle the bandwidth requirements (PCI can't exactly get to 480Gbps). Not to mention that the net processing power would need to increase a few orders of magnitude to do the work. This isn't happening any time soon, as bandwidth needs are growing as fast as silicon processing power is growing. (C) Speaking of which: Moore's law is helping out the routers, too. We're all on silicon; this isn't a game where commodity devices are improving at a faster pace than the incumbent technology. This goes back to the cost point; if there is enough volume to drive a dedicated solution, that will continue to survive. (D) Remote really isn't all that remote... for any reasonably large company, they have routing experts that can manage the routers from a remote location. The added challenge of having a few remote routers is not much of an event, except when hardware upgrades are required.(E) It's not all about the ability to route. Can a PC keep up with latency, jitter, and uptime (99.999%) requirements when using a network for VoIP? (I don't know, but I have deep suspicion that it can't without blowing out the budget)
Please don't get me wrong - XORP may have some places where it can trump Cisco and Juniper (SMB, for example?); but routing with the traditional players and traditional hardware devices will be here for some time.
Cisco claims to hire only the top 15 percent or so of the candidates out there, so "bottom 10 percent" doesn't have the usual meaning. It's more like the bottom 10 percent of a class of science or engineering graduate students.
What many people fail to realize is that companies like Cisco and Juniper create an OS that interoperates with specialized ASICs that allow a network device to switch/route packets much faster than a traditional time-shared system. While I think the XORP initiative is a good step forward in the way of low-end routers, will XORP give full support to users, for both the hardware and software? If you call Cisco's TAC for support, they will look at your entire system, not just the software and not just the hardware. Companies pay more but they get more in return.
That this may be developing into the new cut-and-paste "form troll". This guy has popped up in a few different discussions with very, very similar AC posts about H1B and "bell curve" hiring, and generally popped up very early in the discussion, almost as if he had his response written out ahead of time. Either he's trying to make some kind of point about the ubiquity of H1B/bellcurve practices, or he just made a few different posts and the similarity is just a coincidence, or we're going to see this same post with names swapped out attached to about one story a day for the next couple of months.
PowerPC? Not MIPS?
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
(Not that I could immediately replace Quagga with XORP here anyway - we use OSPF.)
The previous poster made some good points:
1. That cisco utilizes outsourcing as a means
to save money while domestic candidates with suitable skills are available. This is going
to be a religious issue nowadays and no amount
of ad-hominem negativity will address it adequately.
2. That the employment strategy used to evaluate and 'motivate' employees is rather callous and overbearing.
If you can address these points and demonstrate
the falsity of these assertions then maybe someone will take you seriously. Otherwise you are just preaching to other smug 'realists'.
If you need carrier class routing/switching, XORP will never be able to do it for you, ever.
If you need a cheap router, go buy one. 50 bucks gets you quite a bit of power in a Linksys or D-link.
Where does XORP come in again?
And it was the bottom 5%, not 10%. It's a cliche around Cisco whenever there's an "unsubscribe me" flood on a big mailing list.
If XORP truly is the routing platform of the future. Then why shouldn't Cisco, a hardware company, ship their routers with XORP instead of IOS.
I don't see what the big deal is. As stated earlier by a couple people, they are a hardware company that produces some serious iron dedicated to routing and network management. A new OS doesnt stand to hurt them at all. The prospect of it doesnt even warrant an article. Nor any response to that artic...
A couple of OSS projects have tried and essentially failed to be stable BGP4 daemons before, but OpenBGPD from the OpenBSD team looks like it's set to succeed where others failed. I understand the FreeBSD team is already including it with their OS and there's supposedly porting work being done to other OSs.
Given the track record of the other OSS routing projects, I would think administrators would be dubious by now, but with OpenBSD's solid track record OpenBGPD should be a safe choice.
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
BTW, after I posted that gnu zebra is a great router already I looked at the site closer, first is bsd licensing (meaning changes do not need to be put back and it can be sold without source). it became apparent that microsoft might be getting people to submit code where they can run cisco out of business. Imaging microsoft routers running the net....oh my gawd
You could, but a math genius like you would realize that with the relative population numbers, the equalization point will be only slightly above the other countries' wages and only a small fraction of current US wages.
US monopoly on high wages has to end at some point with globalization.
True. That's one reason that I'm a globalization Luddite.
the problem is that computer science is so diluted in our schools because our younger children don't learn math properly.
And why should they if there are no decent-paying jobs available that require those math skills?
thats really the big question of open source, is just how much unemployment can a bunch of sex starved, pimpled teenagers looking for geek cred, create?
there are no security benefits to open source, quite the contrary, since all the small dick hackers have the source god help you, they know all your back doors.
at the end of the day open source programers are subtly putting themselves out of jobs.
why would anyone pay for programers when you can get a bunch of kids to do it for free!
Cisco is the only company with an employment policy that is worse than the one at Intel. Cisco does quarterly performance reviews; they are strictly by the bell (i.e. gaussian) curve. The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.
So you actually believe Cisco fires 40% of their workforce annually? Time for a reality (and fact) check.
I don't know about your experience in other parts of the plannet but certainly Cisco support is not the same everywhere.
I had problems with Cisco routers and the local Service had me waiting for weeks. That's not the type of response you need when you are running an ISP. After some poblems we decided to get rid of all the Cisco routers and use PC running linux instead. At least whe could go down the shop and buy a new PC and have it up and running in a few hours and fix the problem if something goes wrong.
Also, for local prices, I can have 5 PCs acting as routers for the price of one cisco router.
-- EOF
Just thought I'd mention that the control processors for Chiaro's fully optical uber-routers (how many OC-192s?) run on FreeBSD.
You could've hired me.
The point being we really don't use routers anymore. We use switches because they can keep pace with the price performance we need to maintain. Routers work ok but up to a point, then the economics and complexity of managing ever increasing bandwidth, endpoints and whatnot makes routers, even free routers not cost effective.
Remember people YOU are the most expensive element, not the machine. YOU are.
Lets see, first off ALL ROUTING IS DONE IN SOFTWARE! Cisco's are using IOS to route packets - nothing is being done at the hardware level.
Second, the site you reference (ntop.org) that kernel patch is to improve kernel packet *capturing* ability -- basically to do Gbit speed captures. It has nothing to do with routing.
Thirdly, even a low end pentium is fast enough to route packets at 30 - 40 Mbits, go up to a P4 2.8Ghz and you can push Gbit at wirespeed.
To the people who say that Cisco's IOS is based on BSD.... It's not... Juniper's JunOS is (But with ASICs to do actual packet forwarding)...Actually, IOS uses an old malloc library from Linus Torvalds (among other open source pieces, but only ones that are public domain.)
OK, so not all US programmers are especially competent, but nor are all foreigners. The only reason companies use H1B visas is so they can pay way less than the going rate for skilled labor and demote their own employees to the status of fast food workers.
Any company that claims there just aren't enough skilled workers in the US is flat out lying, and I know, I'm interviewing people almost every day. It's a real pain to find someone who actually knows half of what they claim to know, but the batting average of non US citizens is vastly worse, not better. On average, the applicants who were born in the US tend to be dramatically better than those who were not, on average. Draw your own conclusions about why that is, possibly because a lot of countries with a lot of people (India) are churning out a lot of bad programmers because no other skill will get people into the US, perhaps.
I worked at Cisco too. I was a contractor, I was paid and treated VERY well. Cisco DOES cut the bottom 10% (saw it happen) but not in every group, and the DO bring H1B's over in droves. They pay the H1Bs well (better than most) and most of them are talented, but the still are paying below standard wages. Cisco will make a penny scream for mercy if it affects production costs. They got guys/gals working there that put in 90 hour weeks in the hopes their stock options will ever get above water. I don't know how many times I heard if the stock hits $XX I'm cashing in and leaving. So, in many cases the rank and file employees are OK with the H1Bs if it saves money, as long as they are not replaced by them!
What is the difference between xorp and zebra? Isn't Zebra on a BSD already sturdy ?
Companies in the valley should be utterly fined into oblivion if they are hiring H1B engineers right now
This is an interesting issue because it brings up questions which are rarely considered in the US.
Should markets really be free and unregulated?
A lot of the rhetoric from the current American administration seems to indicate this, and it's the line taken by the WTO and World Bank.
However most of the leading nations of the world protect their markets to some extent (which is what you are proposing here).
To countries from outside the USA, like India (for example) it must seem a little bit hypocritical to simoultaneously call for them to open their markets whilst closing important US markets (IT and agriculture to name two) to competition from outside the US.
I have to wonder how many jobs are 'taken' by immigrants, and why are they considered un-American anyway? Should you allow children of first generation immigrants? Only 2nd generation? Questions like this will become more and more difficult to answer as the global job market becomes more fluid.
I hope one day they won't have any meaning.
The above is also absolutely true for Juniper, Foundy, Extreme and Force10 - and, as you point out, Nortel. Switching packets in software hasn't been a standard practice (outside of bugs) in most modern platforms for many years.
CPU's are fast now. Heck, memory speeds are getting very fast. An Opteron might even be able to switch packets between a couple of 10G interfaces at- or near- line rate. Now extend that to a box with 32 10G interfaces in it. You now not only need 320G to the physical interfaces via some number of bus connections, you've also got to be able to move packets in- and out- of memory, maintain routing adjacencies and any other miscellaneous network management tasks ... all in real time. PC's are not built to do this. Outside of real-time extensions Linux/BSD/et al are not built to do this.
Think of it this way - assume an average packet size of 300 bytes. On a one gigabit ethernet interface this represents something on the order of 40,000 packets per second ... in one direction. Multiply this by 10. Now by 32 interfaces. What does an OS and PC platform look like that can malloc() 25.6 million times per *second* above and beyond any other OS processes? Oh - and don't forget the fancy queues, packet re-writing, CRC calculation and such that would necessarily follow each one of these memory operations.
This is obviously an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that everyone in the industry pretty much figured out a bunch of years ago that distributed forwarding via dedicated hardware was the only realistic answer to this problem. This is why the CPU in just about any Cisco platform you'll see in common is less capable than a lot of PDA's out there and also why the architecture of basically all of the major players is moving toward a condition where forwarding and network control are handled by roughly autonomous units.
Even if all the hippies maintain the roads. Somebody has to build the bridges and highways. The category of organizations XORP would address are not a threat to the heavy iron industries.
As a Cisco employee I appreciate competition. I think the company does as a whole. During the down turn we really could have hurt Juniper with aggrieve price-cutting. With 20 billion in the bank we could have done massive damage to them but we didn't. A company like Microsoft probably would have. So competition is very healthy however I feel that Dell and the Asian competitors such as Huawei will probably give us a run for our money at the near term, not an open source project.
:-)
But really want I wanted to point out is that this '10% gets cut per quarter' statement is pure fiction. We have a bottom 5% policy and even that it isn't strictly enforced. It's probably closer to a bottom 2% policy, which is healthy. If during the quarterly ranking you are rated as a non-performer (N) you are placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP) or you have the option of a mutual separation. Those who choose the mutual separation get a severance, which is typically between 3-6 months of their salary.
Cisco has been voted one of the top places to work in American year after year by its employees. Most people don't realize that Customer Support Engineers that work in the TAC (support) can advance to the same grade level as Directors. At that point you are likely making 200k+ a year. So technical people aren't forced in to management if they want to 'move up' which is how it should be. John Chambers has fought hard for continued employee ownership (Stock Option Expensing) and Cisco truly values their employees as their most important asset.
I wouldn't work anywhere else...
Your flaming isn't so good.
Yes most routing is done in software, especially if there are policies to apply. Typically, however, this is just the first packet of a conversation and the balance of the traffic is switched in hardware by referencing tables, aka MLS, router on a stick, route once switch many, etc...
Luca Deri's work was done for use in packet filtering but that does not mean it cannot be applied to this topic. In order to route a packet it first has to get to the kernel. In this manner the two functions are identical (BPF filter aside).
Lastly it is not the hardware that is the problem but a buffer and kernel one. The problem is that the kernel gets an interrupt for every frame that the NIC receives, gets inundated with them and drops packets. Luca's article illustrates this fairly clearly.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
Really? Tell that to the teams of guys in Richardson,, TX who design ASICs for the Cisco 6500 and other series routers/switches. When at Cisco I had a few convos with these guys about building in some security features into the ASICs instead of in IOS. The 6500 is the cream of the crop, it can do just about anything you want now and MLPS is being added soon (if not already), and it's got ASICs.
There are so many people talking about H1b visa without having a clue that I would almost assume I am reading Slashdot...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
agreed. someone seems pretty bitter.
The bottom 10% are automatically fired without a second chance.
Man, if I worked at Cisco, I'd be sure to hire idiots. It's the only way to ensure that I'll never be in the bottom 10%!!
(Yes, I know that doesn't make complete sense, but you do weird things to keep from being voted off the island!)
ASIC= Application Specific Integrated Circuit, and yea, Cisco's stuff is chock full of em.
Router# show mls asic
Cafe version: 2
Centauri version: 1
Perseus version: 0/0
Titan version: 1
Clip from Cisco.com
As technology and features mature, they often move from a software-based implementation to inclusion in hardware. At the core of Cisco's hardware integration is application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) innovation. Cisco has developed more than one hundred ASICs for the Cisco Catalyst switching family over the past nine years, with each generation including more capabilities. For example, Cisco was the first vendor to integrate Layer 3 switching into hardware with the Cisco Catalyst 5500 NetFlow Feature Card. With the introduction of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series in 1999, Cisco included features such as quality of service (QoS) classification and queuing and security access control lists (ACLs), and provided them at data rates of millions of packets per second. These features are available, in hardware, across the Cisco Catalyst switching product line, including the Cisco Catalyst 4500, 3750, and 3560. Advanced hardware integration continues with the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 720, which integrates MPLS, IPv6, and generic routing encapsulation (GRE). This is the first time a LAN switch has offered this capability at data rates in the hundreds of millions of packets per second.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
So does addressing people with a certain amount of respect...
The whole point is that the poster failed to show this... The original poster claimed that since 80,000 Americans in the area and unemployed there are people cisco would want in that pool. What the poster failed to realize is that Cisco is looking for very very specific candidates. The poster assumes that all these candidates lost there jobs because companies like Cisco outsource and hire H-1B's... The poster assumes that all 80,000 are well rounded good employees that Cisco wants. The poster assumes that all 80,000 want to work for cisco.
My point was that if you are going to make blanket statements you should at least examine what it is you are saying. The poster did not, he wrongly assumed that all 80,000 people could just be tossed to cisco like you would wrenchs to a mechanic. The original poster is indeed acting a fool.
Furthermore claims that H-1B's get paid way less is largely innaccurate. Have you worked along side H-1B's who have the same title and been at the company as long as you have? If so ask to compare salaries with them and see what you find out. I think you will be surprised.
What it comes down to is that the original poster provided no proof just spouted a bunch of nonsense and a figure without backing it up with a source that showed exactly what that 80,000 meant. I wonder how many of those 80,000 actually applied at Cisco? Ever think of that one? Wouldn't that be an interesting piece of information to know? No because you see the original poster was not interesting in bringing attention to anything he was just interested in blindly attacking Cisco over a "religious" feeling about outsourcing. Without understanding at all what he was talking about.
Cisco has more than the 6500.
Cisco also has the 800, 1700, 1800, 2600, 2800, 3700, 3800 series.
Those have a slow CPU that you really have to avoid overloading. It has to be assisted by "coprocessors" for mundane tasks like encryption and compression, that a P4 could do at ease.
> can't quit
Of course they can quit. They're also given a long time to find another employer in this country.
> don't make alot of money.
You don't have *any* experience with H1B visa holders do you? By law, they are required to make more than their counterparts! Saying they don't make a lot is a lie. INS makes sure they make more than the local talent. Cheaper labor is not a valid reason for INS to allow a company to hire an H1B. Also, if someone is available locally for the same money or less, you are required to hire them rather than an H1B. In other words, H1B visa holders make more money than their coworkers. You need to run that crap by a lawyer if you're ever thinking about looking into hiring one. They'll set you straight very quickly.
> import a cheap
Huh? Every actually dealt with hiring someone with an H1B visa? I've done it almost 50 times so far, and it usually costs about $5k worth of legal fees and a lot of time to hire someone and get them the H1B visa. That isn't cheap. Also, you're required to pay them more money by law, so again, you're nuts if you say that's cheap.
> exploitable workforce
Again, huh? When you add-in the high legal cost of getting the H1B done plus the usual high cost of finding and training new employees, you certainly won't exploit them. If they quit, you've lost a ton of money and time. The high upfront cost of hiring an H1B visa holder almost guarantees that companies are more careful with them than a local citizen. For example, my company gives H1B visa holders almost twice as much per year in their personal budget for training versus a US citizen because we want to keep them.
Again, do you have any experience at all with H1B visa holders? It doesn't sound like it.
I am suprised there has not been a mutitude of posts mentioning GNU Zebra.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Fortune 500 companies are just what tjey are: Fortune 500 companies.
It belongs to their image that they can afford and brag about the top of the line of everything, including IT.
High spending is actually a tool to compete, just by forcing the other players to bleed their resources.
Just like arms race used to do the same function. We all know that forcing USSR to arms race led to the collapse of their economy and eventually their political system.
That's all fine and good.
Xorp is not really for Fortune 500 corps: it's for everybody else, who is trying to accomplish something.
You can take a trip in a Jaguar or in a Toyota.
Jaguar salesmen will tell you, how the quality of the trip, the safety, etc. you can't compare. Toyota salesmen will tell you that you can get from point A to point B.
Just like having a dinner. You can eat the same food in your jeans, but in the club you are pretty much forced to fork it in wearing your Armani suit.
Interesting, a bit. Sure, it may hurt Cisco, but companies like the one I slave for are buying cisco switches with 720gbps back planes (Sup 720-3BXL) and stuffing the chassis full of 10GigE (ok, so not full, but still...)
Maybe at the commodity level there will be an impact (I'm not qualified to look at cisco's accounts to determine the impact of that), who knows?
The recent who-ha over the OpenBSD bgpd (URL:http://www.openbgpd.org/) shows how far opensource software has to go before it will take market share from the established players. It's not necessarily that the products are less able (though on paper, it's short on a few features), but if we have a problem, I want 4 hour engineer response, anywhere in the world, not a mailing list.
I'm an avid user of linux/iptables, but I wouldn't ask the PC it's running on to support 4 10gE cards either.
You are correct that each frame causes an interrupt (unless the cards driver has a interrupt mitigation option, thats another story).
However, why do you suppose this causes a problem? If this is a dedicated router the 'context switch' that the interrupts are causing are usually coming when CPU is 'idle' anyway.
My P4 2.4Ghz machine - I can saturate a GigE network (ie 107MB/sec), so what exactly is your point?
Actually, I understand your point - which is that you don't like the idea of using linux as a router. However, due to the advances in hardware speed + decline in price, we are at a strategic inflection point where for %99 of any average companies need - a 'software' router will function fine.
As usual, the most uninformed post is at +4 informative.
Practically all of Cisco's gear uses custom ASICs. You don't switch at near-wire-speed with a general purpose cpu. You use a switch fabric implemented on an ASIC, and nearly all of Cisco's are done in-house. The PPC runs the CLI, programs registers in the ASICs, and handles low-bandwidth protocol work, e.g. RIP, or 802.1x. Most packets are never seen by IOS.
Just to be "fair" to Cisco, Juniper is not that great. Apparently, Juniper ramrodded a director out of its company when he had a sick child suffering a potentially devastating illness.
> Oh, well, by all means we shouldn't actually measure performance and hold people accountable for delivering. >
I come from an organization that won't fire people for essentially any reason. I watch every day the accumulation of worthless dead wood taking every advantage of the lack of backbone in HR.
I envy an organization that makes it a culture that you need to strive to exceed. If the culture that rewards excellence and punishes being the bottom of the barrel bothers you, then that's your problem and you need to confine yourself to jobs that don't care about performance. You are undoubtedly the bottom 10% anyway.
IronBridge were building terabit routers using a combination of ASICs and *FPGAs*, along with custom-designed memory, as nothing available at the time (1998-2001) was able to handle the speed requirements. You just can't build big Iron out of consumer-grade hardware.
In Silicon Valley, Taiwanese companies hire exclusively Chinese/Taiwanese H-1B workers. Americans need not apply.
I myself was in the process of filing a complaint against a defunct Taiwanese company. I had the evidence to prove that the company was paying an H-1B employee below-market wages.
Now, you know how the game is played. The clerk at the Labor Department actually agreed with me, saying that the laws are unfair to Americans, but that he could do nothing to remedy the situation.
So they should be forced to keep the bottom 10% performers (or rather, non-performer)?
(sarcasm on)
Oh, well, by all means we shouldn't actually measure performance and hold people accountable for delivering.
(sarcasm off)
I come from an organization that won't fire people for essentially any reason. I watch every day the accumulation of worthless dead wood taking every advantage of the lack of backbone in HR. I measure how much productivity goes down the toilet because the bottom 10% is in the corner laughing at the rest of us because they know they face no consequence.
I envy an organization that makes it a culture that you need to strive to exceed. If the culture that rewards excellence and punishes being the bottom of the barrel bothers you, then that's your problem and you need to confine yourself to jobs that don't care about performance (government jobs being best for those of you who simply want to cruse through). But don't criticise those that want to be the best. You obviously don't understand what that desire is all about.
However, the Indian side of the market is not free. The Indian government has destroyed market forces, and its side of the market can no longer generate enough jobs. The ensuing flood of desperate H-1B workers radically alters supply and demand in the hi-tech labor market on the American side of the combined market.
Here is the clincher. American politicians claim that the combined market is a FREE MARKET becase the American government has not intervened in it. These deceptive American politicians completely ignore the effect of intervention by the Indian government. In the combined market, Indian intervention on the Indian side of the market now affects the American side.
Similar comments apply to Mexicans and the farm-labor market in the USA.
We should shut down all trade (including immigration, labor flow, etc.) with India/China/Mexico until those barbaric nations become Westernized -- i.e. become free markets with no government intervention AND develops adequate protections for workers' rights, human rights, the environment, etc.
Go on believing that.
If they fire 10% of their workforce every quarter then they would have a nearly 40%/year turnover rate simply from the firings. No way.
While this also seems high to me, it would seem likely that most of the 10% would be made up of employees on their first quarter (i.e. replacing the previous 10%).
Maybe it's 10% of people on probation?
Believe me, I understand the sentiments myself. I worked for half of my normal salary for a year and a half, where I wound up leading a group of people that had been at that particular company for years that couldn't do the job I did, yet were paid double what I was. This isn't a 'pity party,' it's what happens occasionally, starting with an 'S' ;-) I went from _knowing_ I was working with the best people for the job, regardless of nationality, to a company who was a poster child for hiring incompetents as long as they were a minority. If they're useless, promote them while cutting back contract salaries to insanity.
Having said that, I have also worked at Cisco after the 'special job.' The difference was immeasurable; you have no idea. Going from working overtime so I could eat...to unpaid overtime but doing it because I enjoyed the job and the people I worked with. I left of my own accord to pursue something else, but _very_ tough choice- I really think the group I worked with (not 'standard Cisco' however) was possibly my most enjoyed job in a long time. I met some _excellent_ people at Cisco, of all nationalities, and more 'long-timers' (6-10+ years) than I've seen at most companies at any time...but they _could_ have left with their skills, they just liked the work and the company that much. That says something about a company, regardless of them being hit like all the other IT companies did and having to cut costs.
As far as the cost of Cisco hardware....no, it's not inexpensive by any means, and it wasn't before working there that I got the beginning of an idea of just how much work goes into their gear, and into IOS. In one way or another, almost _everything_ Cisco does, including people, including their ($$$) purchased dev hardware and servers, revolves around IOS and their hardware, period. Quite a large amount of $ to say the least. That really opened my eyes as to _why_ a Cisco 6500 or any other piece of their gear cost 'so much.' The cost to manufacture it really is insignificant, but their R&D costs are enormous in people and in support and dev hardware.
I won't argue that they could certainly 'spend more wisely' like almost any other largish company. They have projects fail or lose funding like everyone else, and yeah, inevitably 'unwise decisions' at times as well. I'll say two things here and wrap this up, but:
1. If you think a 'Linux box with a few cards' is truly going to stack up against a _real_ enterprise switch with multiple gig-ethernet 48 or 96 port blades, and the addition of ipchains/iptables and a few other pieces of software are going to stack up......then please go back to school, or something. I love Linux, I love alternatives as much as the other, and more so in many cases, but there is a _lot_ of work, and not only in software, before something like XORP comes close. I'm not discouraging it, but set some realistic expectations. 5 years after I'd started using Linux (0.8 kernel or so, 1993), I was still being asked- 'what's that system you're setting up? Linux, what's that?' by _technical_ people. Part of that is of course mindshare, media (or lack of then), etc...but by the same token there have also been some tasks that Linux was NOT the answer for (much more so then as it evolved). Anything like this is going to take a significant amount of time, PLUS (not OR) a significant amount of money as well. Building competition for NetGear? Ok, how's a few months? (Nothing against them, but mostly unmanaged simplish hardware). Replace Cisco switches and routers that are handling 400+ systems each, with the same functionality (or even close) to IOS...5 years plus 'a good media wind'..maybe.
2. As far as the supposed 'extreme H1 hiring.' Cisco lost a _lot_ of people during the bust...some areas were flat out gloomy because there are entire sections of buildings just _empty_. A large number of companies slit their throats for the future due to focusing on short term cash-flow (can you say 3 out of 4 employees
Scott
Unix Developer, Admin and Linux Freak/Geek at Large
It does seem highly likely that we will see commoditization of the router market. It makes more sense to provide a chassis that takes full-length PCI cards than to require special cards which use a PCI interface anyway. PCI-E is the logical choice since it provides (potentially) more bandwidth than even PCI-X and you could use a wonky form factor if you wanted to, for example blade-type cards that have their connector on the back instead of the bottom.
Commodity hardware is already on its way, driven by Intel. It's called the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Archetecture (ATCA).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device [with all these other carrier-class bells and whistles]
It's on its way now. It's called "Advanced Telecommunications Computation Archetecture" (ATCA).
It's a set of standards for exactly that sort of device: Form factors and connectors for the line and supervisory cards. Backplane design rules. Carrier and Mezzanine card form factors. Heat dissipation handling. Etc.
Backplane have:
- Redundant power.
- A pair of supervisory card slots.
- A (variable) number of line card/mezzanine carrier card slots.
- Interconnections:
- Two single-ended copper ethernet stars for basic control.
- Two switched stars for high-speed control/packet/TDM traffic (see below).
- A mesh for really high-bandwidth card-to-card linkage.
- Interconnects between selected slots for multi-card devices.
The switched stars are, by preference, Advanced Switching (AS), a compatible upgrade of PCI Express (using the same serial physical-layer signal transport) with improvements - most significantly that it's LOGICALLY a mesh though PHYSICALLY a star/tree. It tunnels PCI Express and several other bus protocols (and the switch chips can recognize when a PCI Express card has been inserted and be the tunnel entrance). But the interconnectinos can also be native PCI Express or copper 10G Ethernet.
Prototype devices are available now (mostly 10G E th, because the PCI Ex chips are just coming out and the AS chips are due about Q2 '05). Expect to see the prices start dropping toward commodity levels in about a year.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
XORP isn't the same as Cisco... XORP is software (or will be), Cisco provides quite a few extras [...]
But you're missing the main point.
Yes, there's more to Cisco than the router software. But the router software is THE BIG THING that ENABLES the rest.
If anybody else wants to get into the router business at a commercial level they have to come up with carrier-grade routing software comparable to what Cisco has evolved over the years. That's a HUGE effort. (Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of router startups that failed to accomplish it.) Worse yet: Parts of it are a Black Art, requiring Occult Knowlege.
A case in point is BGP. The protocol itself is defined in the standard. But a working implementation does NOT obviously follow from it. BGP has negative feedback, delay, gain, and non-linearity, which means that if you don't do something about it you've created an oscillator.
Cisco did a workaround. If you don't do a working workaround that is compatible with Cisco's, not only does your router not work right, but peering it with other backbone routers starts a route-flapping mess that makes its neighborhood also not work right, literally "breaking the internet".
At the moment there may be as many as four routing software suites that have BGP implementations trusted by the big providers: Cisco, Juniper, Redback (just starting to prove itself), and maybe Huawei. Juniper and Redback wrote their own routing suites - using engineering teams with experience at Cisco. They did this with dotcom-boom financing that isn't likely to be repeated in the near future. (Redback alone burned half a BILLION investment dollars, much of it on their softwre development.) As for Huawei, some people believe they just cloned Cisco's software when they cloned their hardware.
If you can't do as well, you don't get to play.
XORP is an open-source project trying to do as well - replacing the dotcom venture capital with academic research funding and an army of volunteers. Once it gets solid enough, it can serve as an exemplar for manufacturers, who (under it's BSD-style licence) can then use it verbatim, port it as necessary to their own hardware, or just look at it to see what the right answers are while writing their own stuff.
XORP is the daemons and their environment (where most of the complexity is), talking to the forwarding engine proper (where things must be fast but are simpler) through an API. With the engine abstracted you can put XORP on a glue layer over your native IP stack, on a software router like MIT's CLICK, or on custom firmware in special-purpose packet processor chips. The rest of XORP doesn't care.
With this software in place, there's still the matter of building carrier-class hardware, tuning the software to it, getting it certified, and providing support. But those are NOT black arts - just a bunch of work. (And ATCA may render the "build the carrier-class hardware" part into "assemble carrier-class commodity components" in about a year.)
So XORP, once/if it becomes sufficiently robust, will drastically lower the barriers to entry into this market.
THAT's why it's a big deal.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The topic of this thread is that linux based routers will put Cisco out of business. I disagree because the lion share of Cisco's revenue comes from enterprise corporations and service providers who buy very large and very expensive equipment that is designed to reliably push data at the fastest speeds possible. You're obviously much smarter than me, however, since you so expertly deduced that I really just don't like linux as a router. What a strikingly persuasive argument.
I have worked with Win32, Linux, bsd and Solaris to capture, manipulate, firewall, store, and account data flows up to and including giabit speeds off the core of networks up to 220K nodes. Where is your experience?
You can saturate a gigabit line huh? How are you measuring this? By the steady blinking of your dlink hub? Can you maintain that bit rate or just burst it? Do you realize that the raw throughput of a 33mhz, 32bit pci bus is 1Gbps? The Cisco 6509 with the Sup720 has a 720Gbps switch fabric and can handle 400 million packets per second. Are you still going to argue that they have the same capacity?
You're right, 99% of companies out there would get along just fine using a linux based router. My point is that needs of the remaining 1% aren't going to be satisfied by anything other than specialized networking hardware and this Cisco's core business.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
Maybe I felt as though I was looking at a larger picture and you were over-concentrating on attacking individual opinions that may have been meant as symptoms of a larger malaise.
;)
IMO:The issue goes beyond speculation as to what percentage of american technical specialists
are denied specific employment due to artificial
complications: read as certifications,salary requirements, etc..
Your arguments regarding how many did not
apply at cisco require proof as well.
The technical specifications and methods of cisco IOS can be pretty easily extracted from the documentation and from working with the ios.
It is hard for me to credit that individuals from other countries have some insight into the ios internals that can't be easily obtained in the
US, and that must be purchased in the form of
visas and salaries significantly less than those
commonly accepted among domestic workers.
Your argument otherwise is facetious. Period.
You bring up some interesting points however,
and though I think that outsourcing and fiscal
irresponsibility in any form is bad, without
a responsible government and corporate society
the whole topic is probably flame fodder and
worthless.
The original aim of the Liberouter project was the development of a multigigabit IPv6 and IPv4 PC-based router with an open design and software and firmware being completely open-source. In order to speed-up the forwarding and filtering functions, we developed a hardware accelerator card, COMBO6, which utilises the flexible technology of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Thanks to its open-ended design, COMBO6 soon found other interesting applications, so far mainly in the networking area. :)
If I were Cisco and wanted to slow down stuff like this, I would let the source code of IOS be stolen.
That way you could call all your legal artillery against anyone writing any code that switches packets, charging them of taking parts of their code and, at least, disturbing and slowing the process.
The code is old and patched enough so that there is more scar tissue than original one. I'm sure there are no "big secrets" in the code that could give a competitive advantage to anyone, so its releasing would not be a great loss. Anyway, they have rewritten IOS for the CRS-1, so they have a replacement...
Of course, if something unfortunate does happen further down the road, this sort of accountability is unlikely to shield anyone - as you point out.
Though the risk of damage to their reputation should encourage some action by Cisco - for whom security is more important than it is for some other O/S companies...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
the main problem here is the hardware. the fastest pci slot right now is pcix-533 and will support 4GB/sec of transfer which is similar to pcie x16. the high end switches or routers have multiple slots and current servers doesn't even have enough pci buses to compare it with the router. for example, an 8 slot router should have a chipset that has 8 buses.
second, i have yet to see(?) any line cards in pcix or pcie that has ports such as 4 x 10gbe, 4 x stm-64/oc192c, 1 x oc768c available for a regular server.
although there are currently no hardware available, i am all for this. not everyone will need these very high end systems. smaller institutions will be able to use regular servers for route processing and this will be the advantage. not all will need interfaces of 10gbe up.
my thoughts is that aside from the software, they should be able to create standards for the hardware to be able to easy interoperate and integrate with the software.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
there are servers with more than 8 pci buses but they will be the very high end ones. if you'll be purchasing those, i guess it will cost even more buying them than buying a cisco or juniper gear. my context for that one is an off the shelf server that can easily be bought.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
You're telling me that H1B workers
- Can quit anytime they want
- Make lots of money, as much or more than locals
- Costs the employer significant legal costs
- Not exploitable
So then why are employers wanting to hire them in droves?Oh, right, it must be because they can do work that locals cannot do. They must be sooooo much more talented or smarter.
I simply cannot believe that. At least not in the kinds of numbers that employers seem to want H1B's.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
> Can quit anytime they want
Of course they can. Slavery has been illegal for a long time in this country! INS gives them a minimum of 60 days to find a new job, and will typically give them years if asked. The catch is that after the 60 days, they can't work unless they get their new employeer to file for a new (and it is just like starting over again) H1B or getting a green card or becoming a citizen. If you stay long enough, you can eventually become a citizen.
> Make lots of money, as much or more than locals
Also true. INS requires you to pay more than market price, because otherwise, the company would be doing it to save money. That is illegal. Most companies pay much more to H1B visa holders so there isn't even the appearance of doing something illegal. INS is a pain to deal with, so you have to be very careful with them. We pay our H1B visa holders 5% more than a US citizen, as our lawyer recommended we do.
> Costs the employer significant legal costs
A company with onstaff lawyers will spend less than others, but I just read that $6k is the usual average for the fees. When you have a fast growing company, $6k overhead per new employee really hurts.
> Not exploitable
When they quit, you're out a lot of money and like with any employee, out a lot of money due to time spent finding them and training them, so you don't want them to quit. You'll do a lot to keep them.
> They must be sooooo much more talented or smarter.
Where in the hell did you come-up with that crap? The only reason they exist is to fill-in holes where there aren't US citizens available to fill. It has nothing to do with being more or less talented.
> Oh, right, it must be because they can do work that locals cannot do.
I'm in Sunnyvale, CA, and for the last six positions I've advertised for, I didn't get a single qualified local applicant. Not a one. I did received dozens of applications from people outside of the US, mainly in India, Romainia, Belarus, and Ukraine. I hired five guys from Belarus that worked on a PhD project close to what I needed. They cost me a fortune in moving expenses, legal fees, and extra training due to the language barrier, so I wouldn't have done that unless I absolutely had to. I'm still looking for three or four additional local people that have experience with body impedance analysis, but I haven't found a one.
On the models I have seen. (Cisco 4500 IIRC)
Based on information I have also seen (The linux project I linked to) there are some models running Motorolla 68K CPU as well.
In some cases there are models that I know ship running linux but never bother to figure out the CPU they ran (Cisco Content Engine 590 for example).
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
YHL. HAND.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What are H1B's?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating