On Tue, Aug 28, 2007, Simon Leinen wrote:
Adrian Chadd writes [on Cisco's TCAM-based 7600/Cat6500 routers]:
Its a great sale; they suddenly have hard limits which "the internet exceeds", forcing the hardware upgrade cycle. Remember how long the Cisco 75xx persisted and note how many people are still running Cisco 720x's with NPE-225's or NPE-400's w/ full tables simply by adding RAM.
"Simply adding RAM" may not be that easy/cheap, especially when you have to upgrade it on many linecards (VIP2s anyone?). On distributed platforms with hardware forwarding in the linecards (GSR) this is/was probably even worse, you have these "hard limits" in the linecards.
Yes, but people -are- still acquiring VIP2-80's and such, maxing them out with RAM, and deploying them in the network. You might not see it in the US as much but, if c-nsp is anything to go by, they're quite popular in "internet developing" nations. People are "simply adding RAM" to older routers to squeeze the last few cents. Then you get people that'll quite happily throw on BGP filters to drop down the table/FIB size and use a default to get to the rest. Or people doing similar tricks on Cisco 3550 L3 switches. In any case, I was primarily referring to the staying power of the non-distributed Cisco forwarding platforms. Adrian