[ I had given up this thread but since I started it ... ] Apart from minor details I agree with this comment anyway.
On Mon, 2006-07-08 at 13:48 +0200, Klaus Wagner wrote: <snip> > > on Cisco gear (and others) within about 6 months. I'm sure the price > > for proprietary hardware has dropped substantially since then. > > disagree the price is still at the same level (just the releases went > up) What do you mean "disagree" (this is a case of fact rather than opinion --- i might be wrong but it's pointless to "disagree"). The price in 1997 for a Local Director or PiX (h/w was same at that time) was about $40K. Either it's still at that level or not. IIRC, the Pix, at least, has come down quite a bit ... but there has been more competition in firewalls than in load balancers so you may be right. <snip> > Finally to clean up with myths: The loadbalancing in ciscos LBs is NOT > done in hardware. In fact they use multi purpose CPUs to do LB <snip> What "myths"? Whether you call it h/w or s/w is semantics. The LD and PiX used OTS h/w (Ppro, PC mobo) in 1997 (i opened one). The interesting piece was a proprietary daughter board but AFAIK, that ran Cisco's own O/S (which, i understand, is derived from some version of BSD). I think they've merged all the functionality in s/w and any use of non-OTS h/w is more likely for energy efficiency and cost than performance. I understood (5+ years ago) that Cisco was moving in the direction of providing Pix functionality on their routers ... but speculation is pointless ... I'm sure all the info is on their site. --gh
