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The grandparent post refers to "not using any juniper gear" at all - which brings the performance requirements for a replacement to much higher than just the Ne
by barkingcat 11y ago
The grandparent post refers to "not using any juniper gear" at all - which brings the performance requirements for a replacement to much higher than just the Netscreen products (which as far as I know represent an old product series that has been end of lifed ).
Modern Juniper JUNOS products like the EX switch series contain 1GbE, 10GbE, and 40GbE wire ports and I think push the upper limits of standard linux / freebsd on plain x86.
Note that JUNOS is actualy based on freebsd (Juniper forked freebsd a while ago into JUNOS) - but they do it on custom asics.
- jlgaddis 11y agoSorry, I should have been more clear. When I asked if FreeBSD and/or Linux could keep up, I was referring to the forwarding rates across four 1 GbE interfaces, like what the higher end SSGs came with. I certainly didn't mean to imply that an x86 BSD box could perform right up there with a QFX10000, for example. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, Arista runs a Linux kernel on their switches. Or they did anyways, the last time I was out there being briefed; it was a Fedora Core 3 install (yes, it's been a few years), if memory serves, so it must be possible anyways. No idea if they're still doing that but, at the very least, they were at some point.
- throwaway7767 11y agoA few Gbit/s is peanuts for modern machines. Even a low-power fanless machine can saturate that without breaking a sweat.
- jzwinck 11y agoArista does run software on their switches. But that is the supervisor, aka the control plane. The data plane, where the actual throughput is achieved, is done with ASICs, and in some cases where user programmability is needed, FPGAs. At no point does Linux handle 1 Gbps+ traffic in those switches.