RE: CIDR Report

["Roeland Meyer (E-mail)" <rmeyer () mhsc com>]

> 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).