— Grant Lenahan, Appledore research Group There’s a saying: “You can forward packets, count them or classify them. Pick one.” For as long as i can remember, there have been trade-offs between telemetry and router performance, and between DPI and router performance. The problem has often been “solved”, if we can call it that, by having tandem systems – one routing and one performing DPI or other tasks on a subset of the stream. On Wednesday, NOKIA announced its new FP4 packet processor, which claims not only to increase speeds and density by more than twofold, but to do so while delivering DPI, DDOS protection, and rich telemetry, all at once. So why was ARG, the self-proclaimed cloud management guys, covering a hardware launch and why am I blogging on hardware? Simple – chips such as FP4 will pave the way for more advanced management tasks. We can collect more telemetry data. We can collect that data more often. We can push complex masks to the chip and ask it to pattern match everything. We can do what has heretofore been possible, but uneconomic. We also presume that even if NOKIA is ahead of the industry (as they claim) that […]