Re: Speed Vs Stability
That might be why AT&T are doing this. Cisco or Juniper release their latest bleeding edge code, operator needs to test it before hitting the 'I feel lucky' button and rolling it out.
But this isn't new. Back in the mists of time Demon used gated on unix boxes for routing. Some years later, I looked into doing the same for another very large network and had some meetings with a company who's name escapes me, but develop and maintain a commercial gated, which I think Deutsche Telecom used.
Problem with IOS and JunOS is both have bloated to include a huge range of bells & whistles that typically aren't required on a core router and can just create vulnerabilities.. Plus the cost of licences and maintenance. And if you look at what a typical core router does, it's mostly doing BGP, ISIS or OSPF and holding a bunch of routing tables, aka VPNs or VRFs.
And there's been routing table bloat, both with the plain'ol Internet and also customer VRFs. Traditional routers have often had very limited memory onboard, which limits the services that can be offered, ie max routes in a VRF for a customer VPN due to memory limitations.
And then there's Ethernet. So now a core router is something that can connect to a bunch of 100Gbps interfaces and run a pile of routing instances. A smart CTO might be looking at the cost/features/performance of a 'cloud' VM platform and then looking at the cost of a core Cisco or Juniper, and wondering why one is so much more expensive than the other. Especially as the VM platform is likely to be more expandable, offer backup/rollback/auto-deployment features that make offering customers a VPN+services play cheaper and easier to automate. Oh, and be 'network ready' for SDN.
The same holds true at the edge, so a consumer router needs an Ethernet in, and an Ethernet out. Why would you need a router when there's only 2 interfaces?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
