Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.
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
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
Says who?
Someone will start "Cheap Routers, Inc"... or companies like Sun or IBM will start bundling it with other solutions.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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
The cards for SONET, ATM et cetera will simply be made in a standard form factor. This will be good for consumers because they will be able to shop around.
Similarly, individual cards with lots of switch ports will become available, because yes, cards will need to do switching before we reach the level of the core system.
As for monitoring the other router and taking over automatically, not only does a sibling outline the process for this, but it's not even difficult. You copy all the routes from one system to another via a management link and when the link goes down (or some logical link goes down, either way) you fail over. This is something you can manage with simple scripts that call common programs like ipconfig and route, especially if all you're doing is routing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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. :)