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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Film at 11:00
Really, there is one important question (not the blame about IOS's memory or so on) - does hardware vendors (just as CISCO etc) really predicts the future? There's a complicated answer. Yes, certain people at router vendors do understand and can predict what is necessary. However, this does not imply that the right thing happens. Please recall that most (all?) router manufacturers are driven by the enterprise market, not the ISP market. Memory constraints in the enterprise market are not an issue. Memory costs (and even the cost of the extra SIMM socket) _are_ an issue, as they affect the price that everyone on the street pays. This either cuts into manufacturers profit margins or into their sales. Thus, router manufacturers can indeed predict what's needed for the ISP market. But history shows that they consistently make a business decision to design hardware for the enterprise market. It's easy to install 2 or 4 CPU into SUN ULTRA-2 or SGI SERVER computers, but it's impossible to do it with routers. And so on. In fact, it's not impossible. That's _exactly_ what you're doing when you install a VIP. But what we'll do with the routers next 2 years? Just now existing CS7500 and CS4700 are 30% - 50% loaded by ROUTING (not switching but routing) and there is not ways to scale them easily. Again, getting the switching off of the CPU is key. Once that happens consistently, then there is much more CPU for routing computation. 30-50% for routing is fine once that happens. It just implies that we need to scale up the processor to match the growth in _routing_ traffic. Fortunately, that's _FAR_ lower than transit traffic, so I believe it's a tractable problem. Just gotta stay on the processor curve. Tony - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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