Routers will inevitably fail. The question becomes how much exposure do you want when it does? Placing large amounts of customers on a single box is more economical, and is long as you have an uplink to your network with enough bandwidth to support them it's not a problem, but how many customers do you want down when a single router fails? This is obviously more of a political question that an operational one. Dan Rabb

-----Original Message----- From: Steve Meuse [mailto:smeuse@bbnplanet.com] Sent: 28 May, 1999 1:59 AM To: Vadim Antonov Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: OSPF multi-level hierarch: side question

At 03:33 PM 05/27/1999 -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:

...

Tony Li <tony1@home.net> wrote:

...

I suspect that the main driver is not the amount of routing

...

...

in the gross sense, but the scalability of the protocol as

information the number of

...

...

nodes increases.

There's a better solution: decrease the number of nodes by replacing clusters with bigger boxes. This has an additional advantage of reducing number of hops (and, consequently, latency variance).

K.I.S.S. rulez :)

--vadim

Side question:

At what point do we stop aggregating customers onto a single box? The technology exists now to have hundreds if not thousands of customers on a signle box, but, Do we want that many?

-Steve