On Tuesday, Sep 9, 2003, at 09:00 Canada/Eastern, Tikiri Wicks wrote:
Be gratefull if anyone can give me a pointer here... I need a router with 14 fibre ports. The thing is I don't want to spend 25,000 Plus on a router like a Cisco 4000 series or a top of the line Nortel. We don't need terrabits of routing capability and hundreds of wan ports etc.. What I'm looking for is a router than can do full layer 4 routing on 14 fibres, each running at no more than 100 Mbps.
Any ideas ?
Find a router that you like with a gigabit ethernet interface, and plug it into a suitable switch. Configure that gig port as an 802.1q trunk. Configure 14 VLANs on the switch, and assign one 100M port to each. Configure 14 VLAN interfaces on the router. If you can't find a switch that you like with suitable numbers of SX ports (assuming it's SX you want), buy some external transceivers. There are modular units around that will do the media conversion you need, so it doesn't have to be too messy. 100M switch ports are invariably cheaper than 100M router ports. If you really want to route 100M between interfaces without dropping frames, you'll want to be able to handle line rate on the gig port. That means you're talking about expensive routers, quite possibly sold by vendors whose initial letter is not "c". If you only want to be able to burst near 100M on those ports, and the requirement for aggregate backplane throughput is lower, you can make do with a cheaper router. If your budget is less than $25,000, look for second-hand routers or consider building something with a fat PCI bus and a gig card which can run *BSD (or something else cheap and reliable that can grok 802.1q tags) and plug that into the switch. I don't think cisco 4000s run to $25,000, incidentally. They were considered old and crufty about six years ago. Joe