At 12:08 AM +0200 2005-07-09, Andre Oppermann wrote:
The biggest routers are being upgraded anyway because of even higher
link speeds and port desities.
I'm not surprised. After all, time does march on.
But it doesn't help if the largest/fastest line cards available
today are made obsolete overnight by people who have no concept of
what it costs to route packets at OC-192 or OC-768 line speeds, and
suggest that all the routers in the world could be replaced by a
small handful of no-name el-cheapo PCs.
A Cisco "CRS-1 16-SLOT LINE-CARD CHASSIS ROUTE PROCESSOR" comes with
4 GB of route memory default size. Juniper's T320 and T640 come with
2 GB of main memory default size. That should take them to some higher
number of routes.
Problem is, a Tier-1 provider is still going to have hundreds or
thousands of routers that have to be upgraded, and there are a number
of Tier-1s. Tier-2s aren't quite as bad off, but although they buy
some transit from the Tier-1s, they still have a lot of private
peering and they're not that far out of the DFZ themselves. And the
Tier-2s have a lot less money to pay for the ultra-expensive forklift
upgrades for the BFRs and GSRs and all that other mega-million dollar
equipment.
Meanwhile, a surprising number of people have to try and get by
with linecards having only 128MB of RAM, at least according to RFC
3869.
On the other hand a large DFZ routing table would simply dampen its
growth by itself. If it gets to costly to multihome because of the
hardware requirements only few would be able to so. Ergo we have a
negative feedback system here keeping itself in check. Case solved
and closed.
And Volcanoes nicely solve the population problem for those who
live too close to them.
--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
