Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to figure out why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual interfaces. Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.
When ANY router becomes as reliable as a dumb TDM device, then maybe we can begin collapsing the POP topology. However, the very nature of the Internet almost prevents this reliability from being achieved (having a shared control and data plane seems to be the primary culprit). There are routers out there today that can single-handedly replace entire POPs at a fraction of the rack, power, and operational cost. Hasn't happened, tho. I don't like wasting ports for redundant n^2 or log(n^2) interconnect either, but router and reliability mix like oil and water... My 2c. -chris
--vadim
On 18 Jun 2002, Jeff Harper wrote:
On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:34, brett watson wrote:
no, just lamenting the passing of an era. an era where we
engineers
cooperated, and "just fixed" the problems as they occured. and we didn't do things like this.
Keep in mind the reason why the era passed. During that era, you had top level, blue sky engineers. Now the field has been saturated by a lot of less than desirable "engineers" out there (not calling you one at all) that ruined it for us all...