Open-Source Router to Take on Cisco?

ickypick writes to tell us that CNN is running an article about the emergence of an OpenSource Router product, currently in Beta, that targets mid-size enterprise customers for about one-fifth the cost of current enterprise networking giants' hardware. From the article: "The machine runs on two Intel chips, but far more noteworthy is its software, known as XORP, or extensible open router platform. The versatile open-source application can direct data traffic for a giant corporation as easily as it can manage a home Wi-Fi network." The current release is available for download from Vyatta's web site."

Comments

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[BiggRanger]

This is good since I always wonder how many back doors are in Cisco routers for Law Inforcement purposes.

FRISCO?

[nurb432]

Dont you mean FreeSCO?

and that runs on pc hardware, this appears to be on custom hardware that can actually do the job. Using pc hardware only works for a small business.. the bandwidth isnt there.

Re:its not the software

[Ogun]

Wrong.
Cisco IOS does nearly everything in software actually. Only on the big iron and catalyst based routers do you have dedicated hardware for packet forwarding. Try storming a cisco box with massive amounts of small UDP packets and see how well it copes. UDP is done in full software mode, you can't use CEF etc on UDP.
Might have changed in the two years I've been away from the networking world, but I don't really think so.
The slightly older 3600 series for example is just a normal PC in essence. RISC MIPS CPU, PCI for the network modules, flash for the OS.
What the do is distribute load instead. Same thing there, the older 7500 series has the CyBys architecture, where each line card is basically a separate router talking to each other over a backplane and a RSP to hold master databases and keep sync.

Yes, the Cisco 7600 has dedicated hardware for forwarding, but that is because it really is a catalyst 6500 switch under the hood.

Granted, many of the interface cards do a lot of processing for that media, framing etc, which keeps load of the main CPU. But what it comes down to is that IOS is quite efficient at doing what it does, which is forward packets.

If you want to learn more, I can strongly recommend the book "Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture" from Cisco Press, ISBN: 1578701813