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, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> "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.