A Radical New Router

This is more like an ad than an article. Flow-based routers have been developed in the past, and the reason they are not prevalent is due to performance issues of one kind or another.

If they truly have solved the problem(s) that other flow-based routers had, great, but this can only be determined in the real world.

I think it's faster for flow control and packet filtering, not just faster in general.

The illustration states that P2P traffic is problem to be solved by this router. Article also states: "How Flow Routing Works

Flow managers keep track of streams of packets and can protect voice and video transmissions while reducing peer-to-peer traffic."

"Worse, peer-to-peer (P2P) services, used to download movies and other large files, are eating more and more bandwidth. P2P participants may constitute only 5 percent of the users in some networks, while consuming 75 percent of the bandwidth."

Also seems like this would make tiered internet easier in general. Doesn't this router have big implications on the Net Neutrality debate?

It would have been appreciated if the author could have compared his technology against CEF+CBQ. Suggesting that routers process switch each packet and don't treat different classes of traffic differently when avoiding congestion with packet drops is like suggesting we divide IP spaces using classful addressing. True in 1993, but...

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Express_Forwarding See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

It annoys me when router vendors (Cisco, looking at you) advertise their throughput as theoretical maximum bi-directional. Almost no real network design can take advantage of that speed. If this router only has 4x10g port (the two left cards), for all intents and purposes it's a 40-50gbit router. That's probably a great deal in the $50-100k range, though, so there's still a place for it.

I feel like I'm telling Larry Wall what is up with Perl or something, but this guy is making route caching sound like something new, when it has been in crappy $4000 workgroup-class layer three switches now for almost a decade. This kind of deflates his "I should know" appeals to authority.

The buffer-alternative algorithm isn't well explained but sounds kind of novel and useful. It would be particularly so if it allows the network operator to manage flows on a per subscriber basis.

One other concern: if this router is cutting power/weight corners by decreasing its ability to calculate new routes ("flows"), it's possible that an ISP would be exposing themselves to a DoS of their network by intruders sending a lot of unique flow requests to the router. An obvious example of this would be several concurrent NMAPs of a large range of IPs.

If it can keep up with the large workloads they claim with only 300w and 3U (or so) of space, it's pretty compelling, all of these issues aside. I'm excited to see it in the real world.

I see no mention of UDP in this article, which is what 99% (if not more) voice and video traffic is transmitted as (omitting stuff wrapped in HTTP). Can it also detect flows of UDP?

Is computing a hash over 4x4bytes (+1 protocol bit) really faster than looking up an address (that is only 4bytes long, btw) in an optimized routing table ?

That seems counterintuitive to me.

See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/mind-the-flo... for some skeptical comments on this.

From an aesthetic perspective, here are some router designs done recently by Goldsmiths students in London - http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/july1/the-humbl...

I like the idea of a router that shows you average signal strength throughout the day.

A "radical" new router? Perhaps a more apropos 80s adjective would be "tubular"?

edit: OK, HN doesn't like puns? Good to know.