[j-nsp] MX304 Port Layout

[Andrey Kostin]

Hi Saku,

Saku Ytti писал(а) 2023-06-09 12:09:
> On Fri, 9 Jun 2023 at 18:46, Andrey Kostin <ankost at podolsk.ru> wrote:
> 
>> I'm not in this market, have no qualification and resources for
>> development. The demand in such devices should be really massive to
>> justify a process like this.
> 
> Are you not? You use a lot of open source software, because someone
> else did the hard work, and you have something practical.
> 
> The same would be the thesis here,  You order the PCI NPU from newegg,
> and you have an ecosystem of practical software to pull from various
> sources. Maybe you'll contribute something back, maybe not.

Well, technically maybe I could do it. But putting it in production is 
another story. I have to not only make it run but also make sure that 
there are people who can support it 24x7. I think you said it before and 
I agree that the cost of capital investment in routers is just a small 
fraction in expenses for service providers. Cable infrastructure, 
facilities, payroll, etc. make a bigger part, but risk of a router 
failure extends to business risks like reputation and financial loss and 
may have a catastrophic impact. We all know how long and difficult can 
be troubleshooting and fixing a complex issue with vendor's TAC but I 
consider the price we pay hardware vendors for their TAC support 
partially as a liability insurance.

> Very typical network is a border router or two, which needs features
> and performance, then switches to connect to compute. People who have
> no resources or competence to write software could still be users in
> this market.

Sounds more like a datacenter setup, and for DC operator it could be 
attractive to do at scale. For a traditional ISP with relatively small 
PoPs spread across the country it may be not the case.

Kind regards,
Andrey