In a message written on Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 11:08:26AM -0700, vijay gill wrote:
substantially behind moores observation to be economically viable. I have some small number of route processors in my network and it is a major hassle to get even those few upgraded. In other words, if you have a network that you can upgrade the RPs on every 18 months, let me
You're mixing problems. Even though you may only be able to put in a new route processor every 3-5 years doesn't mean the vendor shouldn't have a faster version every 18 months, or even sooner. It's the addition of the two that's the problem. You're 5 year cycle may come a year before the vendors 5 year cycle, putting you on 9 year old gear before you refresh next. Vendor J got it half right. The RP is a separately replaceable component based on a commodity motherboard, hooked in with commodity ethernet, using the most popular CPU and ram on the market. And yes, I understand needing to pay extra for the sheet metal, cooling calculations, and other items. But, they still cost 10x a PC based on the same components, and are upgraded perhaps every 3 years, at best. They don't even take advantage of perhaps going from a 2.0Ghz processor to a 2.4, using the same motherboard, RAM, disk, etc. But I think the point still stands, I bet Vendor J in particular could pop out a Core 2 Duo based RP with 8 gig of ram and a 300+ gig hard drive in under 6 months while holding the price point if BGP convergence demanded it, and their customers made it a priority. To Bill's original e-mail. Can we count on 2x every 18 months going forward? No. But betting on 2x every 24 months, and accounting for the delta between currently shipping and currently available hardware seems completely reasonable when assessing the real problem. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org