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Router Wars
Chris Holland writes "On the heels of Juniper Networks' recent release of its TX Matrix Platform, Om Malik is giving an interesting overview of current and upcoming battles between protagonists of the Router Game, armed with their Terabit toys."
Did anyone else think Linksys Routers, hehehehehe *passes out on the couch*
I'm pretty sure that summary says something meaningful, but heck if I can figure out what it is.
The sound...of 2 teeeeeerrrrrrraaabits...of raw poowweerr.
Watch the Juniper Junker take on the Cisco Crusher this SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY.
Kids's tickets are just five buuuuux!
Please help metamoderate.
There's the Cisco packet game. The game that not only confused me about who it was being marketed toward. But also drove me nuts about its gig with Port au Prince and whatever the rest of the crap on it was. I'm no expert on Haiti, but I don't think stereotyping everyone living in Port au Prince as impoverished schmos who get their water from 5 hours away per day. The game's simply creepy. Peter Packet
Is that the thing thar InterWeb(tm) runs on?
WTF.
= Grow a brain...
Click here or here.
if that's not redundant.
c _id=63 958&site=lightreadingm /document.asp?doc_id=63 916&site=lightreadingm /document.asp?site=test ing&doc_id=63606
This is a large battle, but not one that is won or lost over a few months and not one that is won by comparing simplistic metrics that the press like to use. Software, management, and operations support have always been key in the routing market. Many faster or bigger router companies with unique technologies have gone nowhere. The list is long and depressing. In any case, Cisco has made a dangerous jump ahead by introducing a new operating system that is loosely based on QNX and enables multi-chassis systems. It also enables in-service software upgrades and host of other operations friendly features. Juniper was perceived as having an edge in software, but Cisco will have leapfrogged them if their software delivers (and that's a big if in many people's minds).
Juniper's TX is somewhat handicapped in it's first release (I believe only 2 systems can be linked) and doesn't have a paying customer. Cisco's CRS-1 is limited in interface types in it's first release and has adubious first set of customers. There are many more issues including: weight, power consumption, scalability, support for specific features, handling lawful intercept across a system that large, integration with management systems, etc., etc, etc.
In short, the market is hesitant to purchase either system due to tight CapEx budgets and other pressures. Given the relatively diminutive size of the core router market when compared to edge routing and LAN switching, this a more a battle for prestige than for anything else.
For more info and industry commentary, see:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?do
http://www.lightreading.co
http://www.lightreading.co
Never known anybody who's even tried a Cisco router. I've been pretty happy with my DeWalt DW625 plunge router - 3 horsepower, electronic variable speed, soft start, and a nice rack-and-pinion depth adjuster. And what is this tera bit everybody is talking about? I've heard of straight bits, v-groove bits, mortising bits, rabbeting bits, cove bits, roundover bits, and tongue-and-groove sets of bits, but never a tera bit. Anybody care to give me the lowdown on this new woodworking equipment?
How much does one of these multi-terabit cost? More than my car? More than my house? Just a question from a curious and uneducated cretin.
Read I did that sentence four times and then afterwards I cannot image the idea of what it means to be it.
(I think I know what he meant, that because of problems with IOS, JUNOS was more reliable, but I'm not in tune with the router market so I can't be sure. But to continue, in English:)
The analysis of market gains and new product comparisons is useless without prices: what are the MSRP and street prices for the various models? Where do the prices look like they're going for the various models? What a manufacturer is doing with its prices would tell me a lot about their strategy and how competitive they really think their products are.
sigs, as if you care.
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/062104noll e.html
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
I suppose people who are interested in this stuff are kinda like space age tarmac engineers, or more perhaps traffic light designers on speed.
I don't think it'd mater how hard I tried, I just couldn't find routers an interesting topic, any more than canals. Hang on, I'll have a go...
Big up the router designing people! I for one welcome our new router controlling overlords.
I haven't seen pricing on the TX Matix yet but, its competitor the Cisco CRS-1 starts at $450,000US. What a bargain!
Cue the; "Phhhht. I can build a Linux box running Zebra for $100" comments. Which will be followed by: "FreeBSD is a much better platform than Linux for such a solution."
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/062104noll e.html
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
I don't know too much about high-end routers, so I'm just gonna say this:
Begun, the router war has.
Okay, that is all.
I'm confused now. I can't decide whether it's funny or flamebite.
I'm sure he'll screw this one up, too, and destroy what used to be a great story....oh, wait a minute.....
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Link to power-point presentation (Works great in OO.org): New Cisco Router presentation
I think the coolest thing to come out with these is going to be the GUI router and PIX config. You can see some screenshots of it in the presentation, its mind-boggling and worth drooling over.
These routers also have specialized processors on them for everything they do. They have crypto chips to encrypt/decrypt things, they have DSP cards to decode voice, VPN accelerator chips, chips to process ACLs etc. They also have some badass modules for them including Unity (voice-mail) module for the router itself! A module with full voice-mail capability including a 10GB hard disk to store the messages along with 4+ DSPs on the card to decode the voice traffic going to/from that card. This takes a hell of alot of load of the CPU for more generic tasks.
Anyway, the link again is http://blaze.topside.org/~topside/isr.ppt
MSRP is irrelvent.. you're looking at a market of a few dozen a year world wide.. multimillion dollar product.. The prices are negoiated on a deal by deal basis... sometimes with discounts >50%.
... the target audience small enough that they'll be able to hide the fact that they've botched yet another chance to produce software that actually works.
In the real world I expect we'll find CRS-1 and T640 solutions selling for the around same amount per-port.. So it's silly to do the discussion..
The big question is software... Cisco has a rep for producing buggy and expensive to maintain software, while Juniper's stuff is known to be as good as gold.
If you're running a business where you can lose millions/hr durning unplanned downtime (due to SLAs and other contracts), the purchase price of your core routers becomes pretty unimportant pretty quick.
Cisco lost the service provider market's confidence many years ago.. almost all their market share today is enterprise. Sprint is the last major service provider with a Cisco core... and this is only because Cisco gives them the gear and provides a dedicated engineering staff just for Sprint (a staff which is larger than the entire engineering staff of some cisco enemys).
Providers have been testing CRS-1, and already some are calling it CRASH-1. Cisco made a smart move when they decided to make the initial CRS-1 so big,
Post your thoughts of this presentation and the new features of the routers. I think these new routers are AMAZING. Check the presentation and let me know what you think of these upcoming ISRs. I'll try to answer any questions the best I can. Sadly, I do not have any 2800's to play with yet as they are still on order for our lab.
one Huge F**king
Huh Huh he said fuck !
B. & B.
But this one will do the trick!
sPh
On a serious note, I very much like the increased competition in the router market. That's good. Nobody gains and everybody loses when there's only one real player in the game.
I would like to see router developers be a little more FOSS-friendly. Hey, I'm not asking Cisco to Open Source IOS - that would never happen - but IOS supports only a small handful of routing protocols and is woefully lacking on QoS support. Whilst Cisco hardware is very likely highly tuned to the protocols they do use, software is software and a module system would be trivial to develop. (This would not be true if Cisco routers were "real" hardware routers, but almost nobody codes in hardware unless they absolutely have to.)
Would it hurt Cisco to support pluggable protocols and QoS algorithms? I can't see how. It would lessen the attractiveness of any competing system that had some feature Cisco themselves didn't support. And if a third-party module proved popular, it would likely be cheaper to buy it than pay a development team to write it from scratch.
This goes for all their competitors, too, of course. Whether it's Juniper, 3Com, or whoever, no company has the time or the resources to develop and maintain code for all the different protocols out there. They can only support the most popular, which may not be the most effective in any given case. (Popular tends to mean a compromise, not just on capability and throughput, but also on maintenance costs, development costs, etc.)
As things stand, Linux has vastly superior packet filtering and QoS support than almost any commercial router on the market. I've not used the *BSDs for a while, but from what I'm hearing, they're comparable or even better in some areas. All this code, all this expertise, all this R&D, and the major manufactuers can't even touch it. That's stupid.
Yes, license issues would probably block any attempt to port Linux modules over. Probably, but not definitely. As in the closed-source modules in Linux argument, dynamic linking can be considered to involve two distinct programs and therefore not in licensing conflict. The BSDs would have no problems at all, regardless.
Why would Cisco care about such code? Or any of the other manufacturers? It's not up to their usual standards, and they wouldn't make money from it.
Because it weakens the argument for moving to someone else. Because third-party modules aren't their problem to support, so they don't need to care about stability. Because anything that cuts R&D costs without cutting the R&D is earning money. Very significant amounts of money.
Because most of the uber-nerds who are involved in network administration are more likely to have a Unix-ish background (and therefore have a mindset geared to extensibility) than a desktop background (where brand-naming has typically won out over technical characteristics).
Finally, because that would allow these router companies to cash in on the media-darling of the moment (Open Source) without compromising on their supposed Intellectual Property rights. Potential gain, no risk of loss, sounds a good exchange to me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Cisco bought them for pennies on the dollar. I heard from insiders that they immediately sent people into the office and plant and put all of the hardware into crushers. Every box.
That's one way of dealing with competition.
You code-jockey...
Don't ya know Routers is what powers dat innernet?
signed
Peter Peter the Packet eater
Wrong, wrong.. wrong
This presentation is for Cisco's branch routers. They are very cool in their own way - but these go for a few thousand bucks...they hang on the premises side of a T1 or DSL circuit.
The Juniper TX or Juniper CRS are carrier products that would support multiple 10 gig optical circuits, SONET links and other carrier class connections.
You misread
It's the Terror Bit, a packet-data monster. You deploy it at the network perimeter, when hackers try to get in it sneaks up behind them and goes "Boo". Then it stabs them through the crotch with an ice-pick.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Some kind of MMPOG? Is it sci-fi or fantasy based?
that was not baiting any flames. That was just plain old regular flame.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Linksys, A Division of Cisco Systems, Inc.
Cisco had pretty much given up on the cheap CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) market, then bought Linksys a year or so ago so they could keep a foot in it.
--Stafford
I would say the war is nearly over. Cisco will break out the old saying, Resistence is futile, you will be assimilated.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
Whatever happened to Redback Networks?
Speak truth to power.
They have been fighting back for several months.... by offering the Juniper sales reps a $90k signing bonus to come work for Cisco. It's working.
Remember the router scene in Bound. Very sexy!
Of the software routers I know about, GateD went closed-source, has switched owners a few times since then, and seems to have lost most (or all) of its momentum and popularity.
Click, developed by MIT, is Open Source and under active development, but very few routing elements have been written for it. I know of no *BSD or Linux distributions that use it, either. Without visibility, nobody will know it's there to write anything for it.
Zebra, Quagga and MRT are all dead. I can't find a version of routed more recent than July 2000. Multicast routers, such as mrouted, pimd and pimdd, have been left to rot. The wireless software router AODV-UU is not so much maintained as kept on life-support. The others that I know of have long-since been buried and are now best-used as compost.
The number of Open Source geeks involved in science, research and networking is phenominal. Linux is gaining control over the top500 supercomputer list, and NetBSD keeps on setting new speed records on Internet 2. Both Linux and the *BSDs put commercial router systems to shame for the options they support, the flexibility of their packet filtering/mangling, and the level of control administrators can have. (Power... Power.... POWER...... Bwahahahahahaha!)
But with all this know-how, with all this knowledge of the fundamentals involved, and with all the obvious interest these people have in Open Source/Free Software, there is nobody out there working on a commercial-grade Open Source software router. Where routers are used, they're commercial, off-the-shelf branded products.
FOSS can beat NEC's "Earth Simulator", can turn Cray to pulp, frequently out-performs closed-source products on comparable hardware. The European Space Agency even uses a GPLed microprocessor in rockets and satellites. But nobody has been able to a software router project going.
This just does not compute. In the past, Cisco has even admitted to adding back-doors to their routers. I don't know if they still do, or if it's possible to close the holes in the older systems with a firmware upgrade. The problem with closed-source is that you can never know. You can only trust. The very people who know this and who would NEVER tolerate such uncertainty in any other area of computing - for reasons I will never understand - are totally accepting of this with their network routers and firewalls. The elements of their network most vital to maintaining integrity and security.
I'll wrap it up here, to say that I really, truly hope someone replies to this, saying "you're wrong", with a link to a live, vibrant, active Free/Open Source software routing project. That would be the best christmas present I could have.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But as for your nice new GUI for PIX and router config, its going to be the death of lots of networks. I keep seeing people who get their CC** and can't understand an end to end service - routing, ACLs and applications. Instead they want to talk to me about their pretty pictures and how they are doing real work. These new routers require someone who understand how to do voice, data and security. Unforetunately, it seems like most engineers can't understand simple routing or simple firewalls and how to setup them up and how to troubleshoot them.
Oh, well its just more work for me.
I think the high end router market is more competitive than people think. Cisco is the name that everyone knows about, but there are other big players out there. Most people don't know the names because the number of customers for a $x00,000 router is small. The marketing for that type of product is very different and name recognition isn't the biggest thing.
I've personally seen that in the Sprint network in Las Vegas they have many Juniper GigE routers all over the place. But there are other vendors in the market as well. Most people wouldn't recognize the name of my employer, but we are also a significant player in this market.
Since it hasn't been mentioned in this thread. JunOS is essentially FreeBSD. So, you can do cool stuff that the /. crowd should enjoying like running multiple virtual routers on a laptop. http://www.lab-rats.net/v-olive.html
Being FreeBSD based, the Unix geek with no previous routing experience can learn it, IMHO, faster than the Cisco assuming no previous experience with either.
Typical of Cisco.. "FCS 2004" but no one has it yet.
Enjoy the wait.
404
Tony is credited with much of the work done on the orignal Cisco IOS
What does Tony think about being back at Cisco? Presumably he had a reason for leaving for Juniper -- maybe money, maybe technical freedom, who knows? But here he is back at the company he left several years ago.
Chip H.
Bahahaaaaaaaaa
making promises for years and years... I wonder if some un-named providers are still holding thier Avici switches in storage until the next round of testing...
(you know, after they cashed out thier avici friends and family options, which they got by promising to buy the gear?)
I can't believe those guys are still around... Very cool concept, but really, even among service providers, who needs a router that can handle dozens of OC-192 connections all in one location?
Cisco ONS devices would be on your tier1/2 providers that actually jack into the fiber ring via direct STS signaling. You can slide in anything from a DS1 card to an OC192 card and have it MUX/DEMUX straight into/out-of the SONET ring. If this is what were talking about, then no, the presentation is not relevant.
Either way - the new ISR routers kick ass and I got to do minor load testing of my server/bandwidth by tossing a 6MB link on slashdot 8P.
Openbsd
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
that was not baiting any flames. That was just plain old regular flame.
/.--we can tag flamebait, but not flames!
Thus we see yet another crack in the system of
Ah, well, that's okay--I would also like to see a -1 trollbait and +6 "I spit my drink through my nose funny" options. Oh well.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Some small routers like some Linksys were based on Linux. Juniper's routers have a UNIX-like interface... so it seems apparent that a cheap router based on Linux is doable.
And I dont mean a miniITX board with flash and running a PentiumIII. I mean the newer models of MIPS CPUs, or even something like Athlon64 or Power5 for better throughput. Something to compare with higher end offerings of Cisco and Juniper.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
http://www.xorp.org/
I haven't had time to play extensively, but it worked well during initial tests.
Of course, some of you may run and scream because Intel, the NSF, and Microsoft have provided some funding.
What I want is a product that is able to offload SSL processing in large quantities. We're limited right now with our load balancers in that we're stuck at 1,000 SSL connections per second. That's not near enough in our current environment. We need to load balance lots of SSL processors to scale out. I'd rather scale up with a bigger box to simplify configuration.
Does anyone know about any of the vendors in this area? I really wish they'd tune one of these big routers for load balancing and SSL processing. It seems like the CSS boxes are too underpowered for very large sites.
I haven't read the specs on the 6500 blades, but I guess I should do that. I don't think they would be able to do much more though.
We need 15,000+ SSL sessions per second processing capability.
I think if I take my Porter-Cable with Titanium-carbide bit against your Juniper Terabit, my Porter-Cable will win the battle.
Ah yes.. the graphical PIX config, aka, PDM. Lovely little thing with it's real time graphics generation and traffic monitors. That is, until you try to actually get the PIX to do what you want. It's about that time that you hit the X at the top of the Window and fire up Minicom or HyperTerminal or any SSH client. I can write up a complete configuration for a PIX that has VPN client access, some server access on a DMZ through static NAT entries and a PAT setup for inside host in less time than it takes to actually start the PDM, let alone figure do all that in myriads of tabbed pages.
All the other things you mention, like Unity module for 2600 multi-purpose platform, along with Cisco Call Manager Express for a VoIP solution, the VAC and VAC+ (VPN Accelerator Card) are all already part of the Cisco line-up and have been for some time already. I haven't looked at the presentation, but i'm guessing this isn't very recent.
If you wanted, you could buy 2 2600 series routers and 1 3500PWR series Catalyst switch last summer and build a VoIP solution for an office doubling as a data backbone (the switch passes electrical current to the phones which filter it out for PCs so you can have both on the same port). Heck, you could build that 2 years ago using the Call Manager and Unity software versions on Windows servers.
But I agree, pretty neat stuff.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1 418207
You don't want to understand it. The only thing you need to understand is that big providers don't pay worth a damn anyways.
a dubious not adubious
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
By the majority of the posts here, it is obvious the slashdot crowd does not have clue one about the significance of the article.
:
Let me boil it down for you
CARRIERS of broadband must have vast switching capability to handle all of your porn, web browsing, music downloading, and test transfers of the library of congress.
You can't just randomly strew fiber accross the country and hope your lasers reach. Folks who are 'in the business' relize what this means: The cost of bandwidth will come down, as the number and cost per meg of supporting it goes down.
With these bigger switches, how many older ones can I replace? 5? 10? 50?
If these new switches cost me 2.5 million dollars (at $500k a OC-192 card, that isn't out of the question), is it cheaper than having 5 boxes with 2 1 Gig cards a piece? (because of switch plane issues)? Just go think about it, and then relize that this is the price of getting your cable modem for $39.95 a month...
Most medium sized providers would never need a switch this big, On the other hand, as bandwidth providers converge, they will converge thier networks as well, resulting in uber pops with terrabits per second of data demand...
Enjoy!
do I get a -6 "If I made any attempt to articulate just how much that sucked I'd get a -1 flamebait due to the lack of -1 flame"?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Actually, the Cisco CRS has not only 10Gbps interfaces, but also has OC-768 interfaces available (40 Gbps) -- they're not cheap, but if you have the cash, you can buy 'em.