Cisco SWAN solution GRE issues

[Jim Carter]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Peter Faulknor wrote:

> Does any one have any experience with a large scale deployment of this
> solution, say over 100 users?   
> ...
>  currently things are fine for a small deployment, 10
> users, but to go large scale would certainly mean halting the switch
> processor, which is 600Mhz,

No experience with Cisco SWAN boxes, but I am wondering about your load
issues.  Is this 100 simultaneous users, or 100 authorized users (likely
not all using it at once)?  And what kind of traffic is expected?  If
they're downloading MP3's all night, as in a university dormitory, the load
will be a lot higher than if they're just reading mail or doing shell
sessions.  

Here at UCLA-Mathnet we have a relatively modest switched 100baseT wired 
infrastructure and we never see signs of network overload -- except at 
night when nobody is around, and the trans-net backups start up.  Then, the 
issue is getting access to the wire, not any overload on the switches from 
handling packets.  I would be a little surprised if reassembling fragmented
packets puts enough of a load on your switch to bring it to its knees.  
Even doing the crypto: on the FreeS/WAN site they have speed statistics and 
a 600 MHz Intel processor can handle 100 MHz bandwidth; if I remember 
right, that's about the limit for that class of machine.  

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: jimc at math.ucla.edu  http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)