Vadim Antonov: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 12:32 AM
Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
Sure, *any* good router vendor can build a router that can handle 100 million routing table entries.
Not. The empirical evidence suggests that aggregate flap rate is proportional to the number of prefixes in RIB. Now, when people talk about route update processing they tend to forget that IGP and routing table updates are easy; matching prefixes against routing policy filters is not.
I tend to agree, the numbers I threw around earleir were strictly first-order approximations for raw sizes. Second-order would include performance issues and algorithm requirements. I see that Vadim ihas already arrived there.
I would say that a computing device capable of doing today's border routing policies at 1M updates per second is well into the realm of science fiction.
The other item usually included at this level should be bandwidth requirements. What is the size of an update, and how many Gbps load would be generated, at a rate of 1M updates per second? (I don't have the base quantity handy, would someone please provide?)
The questions are (a) can they do it for a pricetag of under $2M, and (b) how many will they sell?
Why $2M? From price ranges in the current market, I would think that they'd have to hit under $200K. Actually, I would have a difficult time convincing clients of anything over an additional $60K. This gets back to my earlier question, how many backbone routers are there (nearest order of magnitude should suffice here)?
The question of profitability of cheese mining on the Moon is irrelevant, because Moon isn't made from cheese.
Typical rough market guidelines are that development cost must be less than 1% of total market size or the project is a non-starter, business-wise. Typical costs for this sort of project are $1M to $3M, over 8 months, with COGm at about $50 (relative to a minimum Number of Goods sold [NOGs] and assuming that it is technically feasible).