"2M today, 10M with no change in technology"? An informal survey.

Sun Aug 26 01:35:49 UTC 2007

On Sun, Aug 26, 2007 at 09:35:07AM +0900, Randy Bush wrote:
> 
> > As long as I can afford as big a RP as the next ISP we're fine.
> 
> and own enough router vendor stock that you can compensate for running
> your business at a loss

	I think the far more interesting thing will happen long
before we see the tables explode and we have the end of the internet
as we know it (but i'm still fine).

	Vendors will come up with creative solutions and push them to the
market as fast as necessary, or we'll come up with other techniques (eg:
dampening to keep that pesky cpu usage down) to help us muddle through until
the factory builds enough 64-way route-processors to handle the updates,
fib download at 10ge speeds, etc.. that will become necessary in the platforms.

	The reason why I say this is because we're going to see a crunch on
the bandwidth side (IMHO) before we see this crunch on the CPU side.  Based
on what I'm hearing from folks in the marketplace, not every network is
selling 10GE's like they're candy.  Even with link aggregation and other
tricks, that can get you to what?  8x10G? 16x10G?  That may help some
folks until some faster next-gen standard comes out from IEEE or ITU.
It doesn't appear that everyone has jumped on the 40G/768 bandwagon and
that n*10G is much more common because it's "cheap".

	After we all upgrade to 100GE (or the HSII - high speed internet
interface) on our routers, what's next?  bundle it a up to 800G?  How much
of a $VENDOR chassis will that consume?  How much power will it require?
Will dispersion over the medium (assuming fiber) be so bad that it's unusable
after going more than 100 meters?  How will the larger networks
interconnect?

	Ignoring how we deal with the rib updates, i care about how the bits
will get moved about.  This is far more pressing in the next few years than
can $vendor slap a faster cpu on a board and call it good.  I think we all
know that the cpus are underpowered in most routers compared to
the desktop and server space.  Compared to the couple of million dollars it
would take to populate a nice HFR^WCRS/t-series network, the cost of a
2.9ghz processor is only $1200 (retail/wholesale), or only about some tiny
fraction of a $1m router.  What will matter is how much that HSII costs and
how transport, hashing, and the ability to mux all those 10G or 40G waves
into something useful.

	So I say, Baah on the rib/fib issues for now, but since
no major networks would want to disclose their backbone traffic, it'll be
interesting to see how and when this exposes itself as the sleeping bear
that I personally believe it will become.. (my guess, sometime
2011 or so, maybe earlier).

	then again, i could be some rambling fool who is out of touch.

	- jared (opinions don't reflect those of my employer, wife
or children, or possibly even myself).

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.