At 12:51 AM -0700 2005-07-08, Alexei Roudnev wrote:
Who need this complexity? What's wrong with old good _routing rotocol_ approach? Memory? (do not joke, today 4 Gb RAM is not a problem, when it is for slow routing system). CPU (the same)? What else?
Can you put 4GB on every linecard on every router you own? Can you put a Power5 or PowerPC 970MP processor on every linecard on every router you own? Does your vendor support you making any modifications/upgrades to any of their linecards, or do they require you to buy new ones with the go-faster features? And how many tens of thousands of dollars do each of those go-faster linecards cost? And how many million-dollar fork-lift upgrades do you have to pay for in order to get the go-faster chassis in which to plug those go-faster cards into? Do you have thousands of routers? Hundreds of thousands? I'm asking serious questions here. I'm not a router guy, but I've heard a lot of comments on this list that give me pause, so I'd like to get real-world answers. Speaking from my own perspective, it seems to me that we've got a scalability problem here when we're expecting most devices to have a pretty complete picture of the entire world. I think that's the real problem that has to be addressed. In terms of the routing protocols and number of ASes, we know that it's possible to build machines which can handle those kinds of things at those kinds of numbers. The problem is that it's hard to do those kinds of things on a widespread basis (e.g., in every linecard in every router in the world), and most devices probably don't need that anyway. I don't know what the real solution is. But it seems to me that we need to find something, and having people say "4GB of RAM? No problem" is not the way to get this solved. -- 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.