remember the "diameter of the internet"?

Martin, Christian cmartin at gnilink.net
Tue Jun 18 21:43:38 UTC 2002



>Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to 
>figure out 
>why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb 
>TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual 
>interfaces.  Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.

When ANY router becomes as reliable as a dumb TDM device, then maybe we can
begin collapsing the POP topology.  However, the very nature of the Internet
almost prevents this reliability from being achieved (having a shared
control and data plane seems to be the primary culprit).  There are routers
out there today that can single-handedly replace entire POPs at a fraction
of the rack, power, and operational cost.  Hasn't happened, tho.

I don't like wasting ports for redundant n^2 or log(n^2) interconnect
either, but router and reliability mix like oil and water...

My 2c.

-chris


>
>--vadim
>
>On 18 Jun 2002, Jeff Harper wrote:
>
>> 
>> On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:34, brett watson wrote:
>>  
>> > no, just lamenting the passing of an era.  an era where we 
>engineers
>> > cooperated, and "just fixed" the problems as they occured. 
> and we didn't 
>> > do things like this.
>> 
>> Keep in mind the reason why the era passed.  During that 
>era, you had 
>> top level, blue sky engineers.  Now the field has been 
>saturated by a 
>> lot of less than desirable "engineers" out there (not 
>calling you one 
>> at
>> all) that ruined it for us all...
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>



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