On Wed, 17 May 2000 02:04:55 PDT, "Roeland Meyer (E-mail)" said:
Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: Sure, *any* good router vendor can build a router that can handle 100 million routing table entries.
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.
OK.. I meant the ability to *store* 100M table entries. Flapping is another story, which just aggrivates the cost problem ;)
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)?
Exactly. We can all *SAY* we want features X, Y, and Z, but who will actually *buy* them if they cost more? I tossed out $2M as a straw man - it just seemed like a good "you could build almost anything for under that price, but nobody would buy". If the added cost is $50K per box, that increases the number of boxes you can sell, but.. The curve for price versus number sold is probably a hyperbolic (even if my old economics texts drew it as a straight line ;) , whose exact shape will depend *very* heavily on just how much price elasticity there is. And most organizations being what they are, it probably will be pretty flabby until we get to the "You need this level of router or you're screwed" state of affairs, at which point there will be a mad rush to buy them. ;)
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).
Hmm. 1%? Based on what I've seen for cost estimates for other high-ticket low-volume stuff (mostly mainframe-class computers, etc) I would have guessed 10%. In any case, I think the point is made that we can talk all we want about how we want <insert router vendor name here> to provide a truly high-end router that solves everything, but the reality of the cost pressure does need to be considered.... -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech