On Thu, 6 Oct 2011, Dan Luedtke wrote:
Are there no line cards with larger capacity in development? Will we still be limited to 0.5M when the problem (i think it is a long term problem) arises?
There are very few platforms today with a 0.5M limit, buying them even a few years back, would be a mistake. The most popular platforms I would say have a 1M or more forwarding table limit, meaning they'll do ~750k IPv4 and 125k IP6 routes (IPv6 takes double space) or 500k IPv4 and 250 IPv6 routes, or any mix in between. There are platforms on the market that do twice this, and scalability numbers keep going up. I'd say the route ratios (routes in DFZ and number of routes handled by cutting edge platforms) and convergence times have been fairly constant in the last 10 years, even as IPv4 routes have gone from ~100-150k to 350k. There is plenty of equipment developed 10+ ago that still can handle the current number of DFZ routes. However, there is still a cost to this as equipment will have to be replaced due to their route memory not being enough, instead of other factors (forwarding speed for example). This is still a problem, it's still costing money, but I'd venture to guess it's not big enough amount to make sure someone will actually fix this. As long as we keep the current growth rate, it's not really a technical problem. It also means there won't be any improvement in convergence time, which actually IS a technical problem, but not one seen to be a big enough of a problem either, I guess. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se