Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 17:20:23 -0400 From: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com> To: Len Conrad <lconrad@Go2France.com> Cc: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Any experience with T3/HSSI cards and FreeBSD? Message-ID: <199907142226.SAA06294@etinc.com> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.56.19990714203040.02d640b0@go2france.com> References: <199907141822.OAA11834@yaga.razorfish.com>
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At 08:49 PM 7/14/99 +0200, you wrote:=20 > > Hans, > > I'm looking at using fbsd with a <http://www.etinc.com/>www.etinc.com HSSI > card to receive an E3 line coming out of the HSSI interface of a Kentrox= E3 > ISDU.=A0 Still some weeks away though. > > There aren't tons of choices at T3/E3 levels.=A0 > <http://www.digitallink.com/>www.digitallink.com has an E3 DSU, and > <http://www.sdl-comm.com/>www.sdl-comm.com also has an HSSI card, but= there > isn't a fbsd driver for the new SDL Comm WANic that isn't available yet.= =A0 The > WANic is substantially cheaper than the ET card. Dont pay too much attention to our list prices. The gov't is buying them at that price but we'll give the reseller price to just about anyone else.= Plus, we have a HSSI card that runs to 20Mb/s (I wouldnt use it over 15Mb/s) for $1995. list that is field upgradable to full T3 speeds. > > But several comments from various people and contexts indicate the FreeBSD > and a PCI HSSI should have no trouble handling T3/E3 speeds.=A0 Dennis @ > etinc.com and Doug Haas at imagestream-is.com confirm without reservation and > from experience that their cards can support ET/T3 speeds just fine. Its not so much the "speed" as it is bus contention. Realize that a full T3= is really 90Mb/s (its full duplex). The issues arise when you have multiple= high speed devices that want the bus at the same time. Our dual controller is a single device so it streamlines the bus issues (ie its better than 2= separate cards). You can put more than one ethernet card in the box,but you should avoid a lot of local routing (ie ethernet to ethernet) to reduce bus issues.=20 I personally dont believe that sdl's architecture (a cpu with onboard ram buffers) will work reliably (as they are finding out a year and a half= later), but software-wise I dont consider them much of a competitor anyway.=20 A bigger issue than the hardware is with the driver itself...writing drivers of this type is much more difficult than writing drivers for T1 cards. With uptimes of over a month on busy T3s Im pretty confident about our product.= 90% of our code is common to our other boards, so there is a maturity factor as well. > > I wouldn't start by asking the same box to run ipfilter with 40 rules,= NAT, > and squid and IPsec, though, and keep up with T3/E3 wire speeds.=A0 BGP4= and > basic packet forwarding with some light filtering seems doable and > unavoidable if you have to have more than one backbone feed. We have people running our bwmgr with more than 40 rules (although its a LOT more efficient then ipfilter) on HSSI machines. Again, the pps is not the limiting factor with todays CPU speeds, its the efficiency of the bus. You probably WILL have to run gated or bgpd, which uses up a lot more resources than all of the forementioned. We'll be marketing a 400Mhz, dual HSSI box= (1U rackmount) very shortly that should be just about right horsepower-wise. Dennis Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com ISA and PCI T1/T3/V35/HSSI Cards for FreeBSD and LINUX HSSI/T3 UNIX-based Routers Bandwidth Manager=20 http://www.etinc.com/bwmgr.htm To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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