We are in the development phase of engineering the deployment of
approximately
60 POPs throughout the US. Our 'standard' configuration is normally
based upon
cisco equipment and more often than not consists of a 7513 connected
to a Catalyst
5000/5500 via FDDI with the various internal LAN segments switched
from there via FD 100BaseTX.
We've begun to explore the viability of deploying the GRF for several
reasons,
not the least of which is cost and performance. Given (and taken
with a grain
of salt) the apparent performance differential between the cisco 7513
and the
Ascend GRF (the GRF outperforms the 7513 substantially in our tests,)
my
concerns are more operations-related.
The GRF DOES support the 'full' implementation (including extensions)
of
BGP4 and the other 'vanilla' TCP services that you'd come to expect
from
a router (er, layer 3 switch?) of this caliber. Since it's NOT a
cisco,
we'd have to deviate and not utilize EIGRP as our IGP of choice, and
deploy
OSPF which poses its own set of issues.
SO, the bottom line...has anyone else deployed multiple GRF400's with
success.
Ascend will tell you that UUNET has deployed (or is going to) a
hundred or so.
I want to talk to people USING the technology, not thinking about it.
Your comments and opinions are welcomed.
TIA,
Christofer Hoff
