CISCO SYSTEMS
CISCO SYSTEMS
Sent: 7/9/96; 4:33:12 PM
From: ltepper@compatible.com (Larry Tepper)
Anyway, Ian is trying to make the claim that hardware costs are driving up the cost of Cisco's products. It's not. Cisco is the king of the hill in Internet hardware. That gives them a lot of leeway in determining what to charge for their products. Cisco is charging based on what they feel is the value of their product, not the cost-of-goods. While it might only cost $7 to produce a CD-ROM with all of Cisco's router software and documentation, it costs a fortune in engineering hours to develop and maintain "bullet-proof software for telling packets ...".
Also, I don't believe that NT servers are the answer to the question: "What hardware should be used for the infrastructure of the Internet backbone". Consider a simple router with 4 100-Mbit Ethernet interfaces. I believe that the accepted average packets size on an IP network is 256 bytes. The transfer time on 100-Mbit Ethernet for such a packet is just 22 microseconds. To support two simultaneous network transactions at 100-Mbit speeds (a packet coming in one network and getting forwarded out another), this hypothetical router would need to be able to make a routing decision in 11 microseconds. But, unlike 10-Mbit Ethernet, 100-Mbit Ethernet is full duplex; each pair of networks can support 2 simultaneous transactions. So to route 4 transactions at wire speeds, the router would actually need to decide where to send a packet in 5.5 microseconds. To support that sort of speed, your software would need to completely by-pass NT, or any other OS.
There are other issues as well, such as hot-swapping interfaces, that $5000 NT servers aren't likely to address. (I don't know if a Cisco 2514 supports hot swapping, since it's a low-end box, but Cisco's high end routers do, as do its competitor's).
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