Subject: Re: OT: Routers
From: Christopher E. Brown (cbrown@woods.net)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 12:37:25 AKST
On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, James Dory wrote:
> We don't have any available old hardware here except maybe one or two..
> scrounging some up would cost too so I have to keep that in mind.
Even purchasing new x86 linux based routers tends to be alot cheaper
than comparable Ciscos.
Unless I am way off on my prices, I know where you can get a flash
based book sized 3 10/100 port ethernet router (about 20% faster than
a 2621) for about a grand less than CDW lists a 2621 without support
contract for. That is an industrial type flash booting no moving
parts LinuxRouter, with more interfaces, hardware watchdog and in a
smaller chassis.
If done right you should be able to do a very nice setup for well
under 2k per location for all routing and switching gear.
> Ok, I got those off the Cisco website I think, but could have been
> misled easily by that website. I'm not familiar with pps rates anyway..
> not sure how that relates to speed 'feel' if at all.
They are the figures they list. I was just noting that I was giving
real world worst case figures, not best case test workbench figures.
A baseline 2600 will do 40,000pps best case(fastpath), in a very
specific testing setup, a 486DX-133 with a PCI bus and a pair of EEPRO
10/100 will do 65,000/pps (fastpath) with the same workload and
testbed configuration. (Interrupt mitigation, fast switching, etc
enabled). I just wanted to compare apples to apples as it were.
28,000/pps was a worst case real world figure for the 486DX-133 box.
One can normally divide the pps figure Cisco gives by 3 to get
something sane. Cisco quotes pps figures based on the fastpath, and
*most* of the time a router is running slowpath.
So long as a router is running *well below* its slowpath pps figure it
really has nothing to do with how it feels. A good rule of thumb,
worst case *real-world* pps should be no more than 110% of router
slowpath pps. (Preferred is no more than 90%).
You need to figure overall router ability based on slowpath router
pps, and a routers aggregate bandwidth first, then on available
interfaces and interface speed. You can easily pack 8 100Mbit-FD
links in a 7206, for an interface aggregate of 1600Mbit, but the main
interconnect bus limits a 7206 to no more than 400Mbit aggregate in
slowpath, and not much more than that in fastpath.
You can stuff alot of interfaces in a router, you just have to be
careful not to bounce off of pps or bus bandwidth limits.
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