Mark Radabaugh wrote:
I'm looking for new core routers for a small ISP and having a hard time finding something appropriate and reasonably priced. We don't have huge traffic levels (<1Gb) and are mostly running Ethernet interfaces to upstreams rather than legacy interfaces (when did OC3 become legacy?). Lot's of choices for routers that can handle the existing BGP tables - but not so much in small platforms (1-10Gb traffic) if you assume that IPv6 is going to explode the routing table in the next 5 years.
More like, ipv4 is going explode the routing table in the next 5 years? On a percentage basis v6 is in fact growing faster. but one of these things is growing at 1k-2kprefixes a week and the other is ~ 2k prefixes total. It's plausible that you need 500k v4 dfz routes at or before 2012 that would be right on schedule from the 250k mark... Fitting a curve to the v6 table growth is an interesting experiment in modeling your expectations. I think it's an excellent opportunity for a synthetic futures market.
The manufacturers still seem to think low traffic routers don't need much memory or CPU. What projections are you using regarding the default free zone over the next 5 years when picking new hardware?