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1

Nope, remember - there is no magic. Any mesh of PVCs that one makes
over a switched network must reflect the toplogy of that network, and
one can set up a matching set of active routing sessions and route
weights which will cause traffic to flow the same way.

Yes, the switches are a bit faster and have less to do. Data moves through
them in a few ms less per point. But as you said (and as I said in our
discussion in NYC), relative to any distance, the speed of light guarantees
that you won't notice the difference.

The question is: Will there be routers available that can make IP
routing decisions based on 40-60kroutes and move 2-3 OC3s worth of
bidirectional traffic? The building of the configs to have a routed
network work the same as a switched ATM one can be automated, but it's
true that it *can be* easier to see what's going on in a large-scale
switched network.

Avi

Uh, yes. Like today.

See NetStar (recently acquired by ASCEND).

Their hardware does nothing *slower* than DS-3 right now, and updates the
route forwarding table 20x/second. :slight_smile:

This thing is a monster, and will make the so-called "state of the art"
7513s look like dogmeat when in full production (presuming the BGP issues
get completely resolved).

Coming soon to a network near you.

2

Karl,

We have been running NetStars in the vBNS for ~1 year. While the
h/w is impressive, the GigaRouter s/w still aspires to the level
of Cisco's. And no, I don't mean gated. As to your comment
"(presuming the BGP issues get completely resolved)."--we have
yet to take full routing in our production routers, but we are
close. We have had some problems with the RMS (486 running BSDI &
gated) being able to distrubute the forwarding table to the
GigaRouter linecards (FDDI, ATM/OC-3c, & HiPPI) during start-up.
New s/w addresses this pacing issue, and we expect to deploy
BGP on our GigaRouters very soon. OSPF works very well on these
boxes, and considering that when the NetStars were first deployed
everything was static, we have made some progress :slight_smile: Also, we
look forward to getting our hands on some ATM/OC-12c cards this
fall.

The NetStar is an interesting router that has made a lot of progress,
and I hope they stay in the race.

            Regards,
            Randy