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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Scalability issues in the Internet routing system
On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:41:53PM -0400, vijay gill wrote: > > Moore's law for CPUs is kaput. Really, Moore's Law is more of an > observation, than a law. We need to stop fixating on Moore's law for the > love of god. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, Components don't get on the > curve for free. Each generation requires enormously more capital to > engineer the improved Si process, innovation, process, which only get > paid for by increasing demand. If the demand slows down then the > investment won't be recovered and the cycle will stop, possibly before > the physics limits, depending on the amount of demand, amount of > investment required for the next turn etc. Moore's "observation" would also seem to apply only to the highest end of components that are actually "available", not to what a particular vendor ships in a particular product. Of course we have the technology available to handle 1 million BGP routes or more if we really needed to. Processing BGP is fairly easy and linear, modern CPUs are cheap and almost absurdly powerful in comparison to the task at hand (they're made to run Windows code remember :P). But if there is no reason to make a product, it doesn't get made. Comparing consumer-grade PCs which are produced in the millions or billions with one small part of a high-end router which is produced in the thousands, and which is essentially an embedded product, is a non-starter. The product that is sold does what it needs to do and no more. There is no reason to design a scalable route processor which can be easily upgraded. There is no need to ship the latest state of the art Dual Xeon 3.6GHz with support for 64GB of DRAM that will last you for your BGP needs for the next 10 years, or even to throw in 128MB of SSRAM for a few thousand bucks more. Everyone needs to sell their latest and greatest new product on a regular basis to stay in business, it is no different for router vendors. They sell you a $20,000 route processor that you could pick up from their vendor directly at Qty 1 for $1000, and the markup goes into the what you are really paying for (R&D, software dev, testing, support, sales, and the bottom line). A few years later when you need something a little faster, you can buy a new router. Besides, you probably needed to come back for the next-gen platform and interfaces anyways. Most customers are barely qualified to add RAM to their million dollar router, and I doubt the vendors see any need to change this. > Also, no network I know is on the upgrade path at a velocity that they > are swapping out components in a 18 month window. Ideally, for an > economically viable network, you want to be on an upgrade cycle that > lags Moore's observation. Getting routers off your books is not an 18 > month cycle, it is closer to 48 months or even in some cases 60 months. Want to venture a guess as to how many networks are still operating routers with parts at the end of that 60 month cycle (purchased in 2000), which were in turn based off of 1997 technology back when they were manufactured in 1998-1999? -- Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
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