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

Tue Aug 28 06:54:47 UTC 2007

On Tue, Aug 28, 2007, Simon Leinen wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes, but people -are- still acquiring VIP2-80's and such, maxing them
out with RAM, and deploying them in the network. You might not see it
in the US as much but, if c-nsp is anything to go by, they're quite
popular in "internet developing" nations.

People are "simply adding RAM" to older routers to squeeze the last
few cents. Then you get people that'll quite happily throw on BGP
filters to drop down the table/FIB size and use a default to get
to the rest. Or people doing similar tricks on Cisco 3550 L3 switches.

In any case, I was primarily referring to the staying power of the
non-distributed Cisco forwarding platforms.

Adrian