Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) GRF routers -- pros and cons
At 12:02 AM 3/15/98 -0800, Devin Ganger wrote:
>
>Does anyone out there have experience with the GRF 400 router?
I think the reason it's not discussed too often is that ISP backbone
carriers tend to keep things to themselves. It's a competitive business. :)
But the only reason that anyone ever considered the GRF over Cisco was that
Cisco was starting to have problems keeping up with the Internet route
table and high-speed interfaces. We consider the Cisco 75xx to be a legacy
router. It's a single CPU (yes it can have a co-processor) and a shared bus
router. Cache misses and lots of high-speed interfaces cause serious
problems with legacy routers.
To keep the 75xx chugging along these days you have to add hardware (more
memory and VIP co-processor) and keep upgrading software to get new
techniques like RED which may not really help much. It ends up being more
money and more hassle.
The GRF has distributed processing routing engines connected by a switch.
They can hold the entire Internet route table on each media card and look
up any next hop route in 1-3 microseconds. The GRF can scale to very high
speeds, very large route tables, very large networks and high PPS without
expensive upgrades.
Since ISP's were demanding the GRF as soon as they could get it last year,
things were occasionally rushed and *certain* functions had bugs. But these
bugs didn't affect everyone and we have many happy customers today. We are
working hard to fix the unhappy ones too.
Just my humble opinion...
Matt Holdrege http://www.ascend.com matt@ascend.com
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