[c-nsp] Your opinions on router throughput

[Alex]

> The question put to us was,
>
> Is there a chance of the NPE300's running out of horsepower
> as throughput on the setup increases to the maximum of each circuit? 
> There
> are customers on the LAN side that could, if all bandwidth limiting
> was removed, saturate either the 10Mbt-burst-to-45Mbt, or the 30Mbt 
> ethernet
> feed, or the 45Mbt interconnect between routers.
>
> I told them to try it and see what happens. :-)  That didn't go over
> very well.
>
> My gut is that this setup, while it may run utilization up past 60%
> at full bore, will pass muster.  Certainly the chassis of the 2 routers
> will, but I am unsure of the real-world expectations of an NPE300.
> (as opposed to the published specs)
If the majority of traffic is between different customer sites (and minority 
is going to Internet) then You may wish to look into Performance Enhancing 
Proxy (PEP) boxes such as Cisco WAFS family or Juniper WX series. Juniper 
just released WXC590 which can do as much as 45Mbps of compression 
throughput.
HTH
Cheers
Alex