On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 03:23:24PM -0700, Roeland Meyer wrote:
This gal only has it half right. It isn't the reduced cost of circuits, it's it's the uncertainty that that circuit's provider will still be in business next month, or that a change in that provider's business plans, or M&A activity, will make them abandon that circuit altogether [...]
I don't think anyone here is concerned that vZn, SBC, WCOM, Q, etc will go out of business, or undergo drastic business changes prohibiting them from continuing to provide us with the TDM, xWDM, dark fibre, etc services they do now by this time next year. But yes, customers multihoming is a good thing(tm) for other reasons outlined. And putting all your eggs in one basket -- be it a large and stable telco, or a small DSL aggregator of questionable clue and financial stability -- is never wise, even if it will save you some coin. And at the end of the day, either our IP providers' racks have power, or they don't; either their cross-connects are live, or they're cut with a razor blade...
At $99US for 512MB of PC133 RAM (the point is, RAM is disgustingly cheap and getting cheaper), more RAM in the routers is a quick answer. Router clusters are another answer, and faster CPUs are yet another.
Throwing more RAM and CPU into our routers (assuming for a moment that they're most certainly all Linux PC's running Zebra) is not the solution you're looking for; the problem of RIB processing still remains. Getting a forwarding table requires extracting data from the RIB, and this is the problem, because RIBs are very large and active, and are being accessed by lots of reading and writing processes. RIB processing is substantial, and is only getting worse.
If the IETF is being at all effective, that should start now and finish sometime next year, so that we can start the 5-year technology roll-out cycle.
Roeland, The IETF is eagerly awaiting your solution. Send code. See Tony Li's presentation at the Atlanta NANOG on why this solution of jamming RAM and CPU into boxes is not a long term viable answer: <http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0102/witt.html> In short, state growth at each level must be constrained and must not outstrip Moore's law, and to be viable in an economic sense, it must lag behind Moore's law. Things that cause heartache normally involve memory bandwidth from CPU to RIB memory when you need to spend a whole lot of time walking tables as an ever larger percentage of your tables slosh around like yo yos.
should either have his lips perma-bonded together, or have the lower part of his face covered in duct tape. Maybe then, he can resist the urge to chew on his feet.
Hmm, always a good idea. -adam