>On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
>
> > And if you _really_ want to get confused, pity me a bit when I came
> > to Nortel. Acronym collision with a crash. On the newer Nortel
> > platforms, the RSP is the forwarding engine, comparable to the Cisco
> > VIP, and the SSP is the management and path determination processor,
> > comparable to the "R" part of the Cisco RSP.
>
>BTW, does cisco still use ciscofusion to refer to that distributed
>architecture? I don't recall seeing the name lately.
Haven't seen it much myself. Has fusion grown cold?
>
>ObPointlessReminiscing: It used to be that you could make cisco
>salescritters twitch nervously by asking innocently what was the
>difference between a 7000 or 7500 loaded with VIP cards and a
>Well^H^H^H^HBay^H^H^HNortel high-end router (BN? ABN? BCN? I forgot -
>that was nearly 10 years ago).
>
Similarities and differences. On the Bay devices, any card could be
the main processor as well, which preceded Cisco's HSA feature.
Cisco's counterclaim was that VIPs cost less and were more optimized
for forwarding.
In the newer platforms from both vendors, there really is
convergence. Line cards do forwarding and multiple processor cards
do path determination. Things get even more complex, and there are
no simple answers, when one considers more processing-intensive
functions like filtering, traffic shaping, encryption, compression,
etc., and whether these are in the "fast path," a coprocessor, or the
main processor. I'm sure you will see both similarities and
differences in new products from all vendors.
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