Has anyone looked at Ascend's (NetStar Gigarouter). We have and like the direction. If they continue to deliver, I think they are going in the right direction. Still some parts missing, I hope we can hold on until they get here, but the direction is right. I think the open idea is the only way to go on this issue. Gary Zimmerman Savvis Communications http://www.savvis.com email: garyz@savvis.com "The only limits are those of vision." ----------

From: Joseph T. Klein <jtk@titania.net> To: nanog@merit.edu; Paul Ferguson <pferguso@cisco.com> Subject: Re: "routing table slots" and the real problem Date: Sunday, March 02, 1997 5:25 AM

Warning -- I feel a diatribe emerging. ;-)

Afordability is primarily a question of how large your existing base of legacy routers is and your cash flow.

You can build a box using a free versionof Unix (FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, or whatever your religion of the day), off the shelf hardware, and gated to route a full backbone routing table (memory and CPU are cheap) for less than $3K. This is less than the cost of a single interface card for a Cisco 7xxx!

Kids; do not try this at your gateway without adult supervision. :-)

We are re-designing the Internet to make up for the fact the largest manufacturers of routers has been slow to develop and deploy systems that can keep up with the growth curve. A lot of this comes down to size of the memory bus on low cost systems.

If port density was not so poor on general purpose hardware, we would have been far better off deploying "open systems" for routers rather than what exists today.

I have always liked my Ciscos, but I truly love routing with my Unix systems running gated. ... now If I could find some cheap channelized DS-3 cards for a DEC AlphaStation 500. ;-)

I may be talking out of my hat here, but I suspect a DEC AlphaStation 500 with 256M of RAM ranks pretty well against a 75xx.

Somebody, dig up the stats for me ...

If router manufacturers worked on hardware and all used an open software standard ... such as gated ... we would all be better off. Open standards allow all of us to benefit from the work of others. The old Unix Guru's mantra is 'build on the works of others.'

Let us not make the mistakes of the 1890s and associate domination of the market by oligopolies as good capitalism. Big corporations, like big government, tend to move slowly.

Open markets NOT dominated by a single large player is GOOD capitalism. It increases the pace of innovation and prevents price fixing. It makes for a healthy, dynamic, marketplace.

This holds true for routers, backbone providers, toasters and operating systems (sorry Bill)

open standards = open markets

Open standards prevent the failures of a single market player from inhibiting the growth of the industry.

Open standards lower the cost to upgrade large installed systems.

Reductions in the federal budget are squeezing R&D expenditures in the US to an all time low. Large corporate downsizing and corporate mergers have done the same for most large corporations. The bulk of innovation in the US will come from small companies and development consortiums.

It is from these that the next generations of routers will come. Open standards make the rapid utilization of new technologies possible and fuel the growth of small companies.

The Internet is a great place for consorting on standards. This is what is cool about the IETF!

Standards do not keep the big boys from playing ... Cisco and Bay could easily join in an open standard for router software. It would not be hard to have interoperability between the IP portions of IOS and gated.

IOS is the PL-1 of routers. Bay's management reminds me of CICS. ;-)

Back to the subject ...

You CAN also use the RA (where available) to reduce your routing overhead, save memory and reduce CPU usage. (The RA runs a hacked version of gated that calculates large routing tables quite well.)

Hmm ...

router $100,000 amortized over 3 years = 2,800/month going DS-3 price at a NAP with line = 7,000/month engineer $70,000 per year min. = 5,900/month overhead for a small company = 20,000/month

$50+/month/mile for OC-3 lines ... don't even talk about local loop costs!

Routers connect customers. customers = cash flow.

The highest cost of running a national network is not buying routers, it is bandwidth, staff, and administrative overhead.

Router cost is primarily a factor for smaller networks with limited cash flow.

I contend ...

It is the ISPs who try to be dual homed with 'routing tricks' rather than using edge routers that can process a core routing table, who contribute most to routing instability.

Boardwatch stated that 14% of ISPs are dual homed. I would bet that 70% of those do not use routers capable of processing a core routing table.

Anybody have any stats?

We need cheap routers that run BGP4 and can eat a core routing table. 2501s just don't hack it in dual homed configurations ... and most small guys just don't wish to blow $50,000 on putting 7505s at the edges of their networks.

--- On Sun, 02 Mar 1997 13:48:46 -0500 Paul Ferguson <pferguso@cisco.com> wrote:

...

At 01:39 PM 3/2/97 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

...

True enough. Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't have routing table growth, as we will have processor capacity growth, but it does mean that the growth of the routing tables must be kept in line with what the router processors can do.

True enough. However, it might also be novel to keep the cost down to a level that people can actually afford.

- paul

---------------End of Original Message-----------------

-- From: Joseph T. Klein, Titania Corporation http://www.titania.net E-mail: jtk@titania.net Sent: 13:25:09 CST/CDT 03/02/97

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759