11–20 of 67 posts
Can that hardware keep up with crypto bitrate and firewall rules, on multiple 10gb links?
There's some progress, though (like PF_RING in Linux and netmap on FreeBSD).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly though, shouting at a vendor doesn't fix your issues within a couple of hours, and downtime can be a pain. Running Linux/*BSD/Whatever on off-the-shelf boxen which you can pickup everywhere (and have cheap spares) and fix yourself will let you get back online quickly.
If it's not your money you're spending, then the support contract helps take the heat off you when there are problems. Also, the junior staff can do things when there are problems and you're not in the office.
Regarding first paragraph of the story (redundant pair or routers crashing at once), it worth mentioning one possible neat trick to avoid this: When having a redundant pair of devices (routers, etc.), make sure such pair is comprised of devices made by different vendors - thinking here being that if there is a bug that triggers router crash, it's unlikely that two different vendors would be vulnerable to the same one…
No such thing as session synchronization for different vendors. You also need to configure everything for both of these vendors, which may or may not have equal feature sets.
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
What's latency like on commodity hardware vs dedicated equipment? I've no experience but would expect the dedicated hardware to be better. BSD is a monolithic kernel, so you'd have the overhead of passing through the for each of the routed packets, right?
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
People who want to have support by a large vendor. If your DIY-setup fails you can't blame a vendor. In theory using the same kind of appliance as everybody else means you can easily find an networking guy to work with it, people who are good at both traditional networking gear and BSD/Linux are harder to find. If a dedicated box fails you can just have someone with some experience plop a new one in, reapply the conf…
If you buy Cisco and a Cisco specialist, you'll be buying Cisco for as long as the specialist is employed, regardless of any leaps or bounds Juniper et al. make.
Same deal with databases. Oracle is often a smart choice, but so is Postgres, SQL Server, Cassandra, Redis. If I've hired a DBA with 10 years of Oracle experience, the chances are that any move away from Oracle will rub against "Why hire an oracle specialist if you're not going to use them?".
My hope is always "Because they're smart, genuinely understand storage and retrieval and will learn the other systems faster than a smart generalist". But that isn't how it plays out.
I would hope that hiring a specialist means that, at some point, they come to you and say "So, I think I can save us money and increase uptime if we move to X". It happens in software all the time. Its hard to keep devs on any one particular platform before they get twitchy (also a problem).
In my mind buying Cisco is like using Heroku, Rails, Ember. All fine tools, that help you get a job done quickly whilst you figure out what your real problems are but shouldn't be seen as the final solution.
Can that hardware keep up with crypto bitrate and firewall rules, on multiple 10gb links?
still, you need some tweaking or things like dpdk/openonload/vma/etc...
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
I've seen this many times and it will continue to happen.
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
Commodity hardware and general-purpose systems win every time. Honestly I wonder, who the hell buys these overpriced networking appliances? Similarly with expensive proprietary databases, or ESB systems. Are they just leftovers of a different time (note article is from 2007)? Is it a case of management buying from the salesman who bought them a nice dinner? Some place where these things generate actual value that I'm…
Pointy Haired Bosses who need something to deflect blame onto in case things screw up. It's easier to assign that to an outside vendor than one's own subordinates that they are directly responsible for. I've seen this many times and it will continue to happen.