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

Tue Aug 28 06:29:35 UTC 2007

Adrian Chadd writes [on Cisco's TCAM-based 7600/Cat6500 routers]:
> Its a great sale; they suddenly have hard limits which "the internet
> exceeds", forcing the hardware upgrade cycle. Remember how long the
> Cisco 75xx persisted and note how many people are still running
> Cisco 720x's with NPE-225's or NPE-400's w/ full tables simply by
> adding RAM.

"Simply adding RAM" may not be that easy/cheap, especially when you
have to upgrade it on many linecards (VIP2s anyone?).  On distributed
platforms with hardware forwarding in the linecards (GSR) this is/was
probably even worse, you have these "hard limits" in the linecards.

Replacing centralized switching engines from time to time doesn't
seem such a bad value proposition compared to
replacing/memory-upgrading line cards.
-- 
Simon.
(Who doesn't care much because we're running at ~30'000 IPv4 routes.)