nanog mailing list archives

Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008


From: "Alexei Roudnev" <alex () relcom net>
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 01:59:08 -0700


You do not need to - any router have only `1 - 10% of all routing table
active, and it is always possible to optimize these alghoritms.

On the other hand - what's wrong with 4Gb on line card in big core router?
It's cheap enough, even today. And we have not 1,000,000 routes yet.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brad Knowles" <brad () stop mail-abuse org>
To: "NANOG" <nanog () merit edu>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 1:03 AM
Subject: Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008



At 12:51 AM -0700 2005-07-08, Alexei Roudnev wrote:

 Who need this complexity?  What's wrong with old good _routing rotocol_
 approach? Memory? (do not joke, today 4 Gb RAM is not a problem, when
it is
 for slow routing system). CPU (the same)? What else?

Can you put 4GB on every linecard on every router you own?  Can
you put a Power5 or PowerPC 970MP processor on every linecard on
every router you own?  Does your vendor support you making any
modifications/upgrades to any of their linecards, or do they require
you to buy new ones with the go-faster features?

And how many tens of thousands of dollars do each of those
go-faster linecards cost?  And how many million-dollar fork-lift
upgrades do you have to pay for in order to get the go-faster chassis
in which to plug those go-faster cards into?

Do you have thousands of routers?  Hundreds of thousands?


I'm asking serious questions here.  I'm not a router guy, but
I've heard a lot of comments on this list that give me pause, so I'd
like to get real-world answers.


Speaking from my own perspective, it seems to me that we've got a
scalability problem here when we're expecting most devices to have a
pretty complete picture of the entire world.  I think that's the real
problem that has to be addressed.

In terms of the routing protocols and number of ASes, we know
that it's possible to build machines which can handle those kinds of
things at those kinds of numbers.  The problem is that it's hard to
do those kinds of things on a widespread basis (e.g., in every
linecard in every router in the world), and most devices probably
don't need that anyway.

I don't know what the real solution is.  But it seems to me that
we need to find something, and having people say "4GB of RAM?  No
problem" is not the way to get this solved.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad () stop mail-abuse org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.


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