Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Tue Apr 20 02:57:04 UTC 2010

On Apr 19, 2010, at 3:10 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:

> * Leo Bicknell:
> 
>> I know of no platform that does hardware NAT.  Rather, NAT is a CPU
>> function.  While this is another interesting scaling issue, it means
>> this data is not going in the FIB (hardware forwarding database),
>> but rather is stored in a CPU accessible database.
> 
> If you NAT all traffic, the NAT database needs the same level of
> efficiency as the FIB.
> 
> You could probably even join the two (you should check that the
> corresponding RIB entry is still current, but that can probably be
> forced to be cheap).

More likely, if you're going to do this (and I would not wish it on my
worst competitors), you would want to push smaller NATs out towards
the customer aggregation point where you can get away with cheaper
commodity hardware that can later be repurposed. Yes, more boxes,
but, much less expensive and keeps the router doing what routers do
best rather than NATing everything on the router.

Owen