[f-nsp] NetIron MLX Experience..

[Tom Samplonius]

On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

...
> Yes the new generation of gear uses a prepopulated CAM as a FIB by default
> (marketing name FDR, same as Cisco CEF), though there is an option to turn
> it off and do fast-cache type behavior, or use the traditional dr/net-agg
> cam aggregation.
...

   Strictly speaking, Cisco CEF is just a way to store a forwarding table for 
fast lookups.  The storage could be in some kind of content addressable memory, 
and looked up by an ASIC, or it could be in RAM and looked up by the the 
router's CPU.

   Even Cisco 26xx routers support CEF now, even though this is purely a software 
device driven device.  You just have to pay the cost of storing both the routing 
table, and the CEF FIB in RAM.

   So Foundry made the jump to putting the full routing table in CAM with the 
MLX?  Juniper has always operated this way, so why have some respondants talked 
about replacing Juniper's with MLXs?  Other than that some of the old processing 
engines on the Juniper's lacked enough memory for some features, there should be 
little difference at the L2/L3 forwarding level these days?


Tom