Would you rather deploy a $3000 cisco edge box which is a unexpandable,
100 mbit piece of crap, or throw two $2000 Dell boxes and have a 1 GigE
platform?
You don't need two $2000 Dell boxes to get a 1G platform, but this isn't
the list for that. You also don't need a ton of money to do open source
development (we do one major project here in-house, one that's responsible
for generating a noticeable amount of traffic on most networks). But this
also isn't the list for that discussion.
I suspect software routing is going to continue to be a growing factor in
the packet herding world, as more people want to do more interesting
things, and the CPU's are able to deal with more, more, more.
... JG