[24199] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: OSPF multi-level hierarchy: Necessary at all?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jessica Yu)
Fri May 28 14:53:53 1999
To: "Alex P. Rudnev" <alex@Relcom.EU.net>
Cc: Alex Zinin <zinin@amt.ru>, Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com>,
nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 28 May 1999 15:11:31 +0400."
<Pine.SUN.3.91.990528150845.25633P-100000@virgin.relcom.eu.net>
Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 14:51:40 -0400
From: Jessica Yu <jyy@ans.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
>Btw. Flat network...
>
>Routers now have - 128 or 256 MB RAM, 300 - 400 Mhz CPU. I guess you can
>built flat betwork with 5,000 routers withouth hard problems.
With a network this large, probability of any router interface going down,
link flapping or rotuer failure is high so it can happen frequently. With
one giant flat IGP area, any such incident occuring anywhere in the network
will cause network wide LSA flooding, SPF calculation and link database update.
Lots of network resources including router CPU will be consumed. Even one
has a lot of cpu power in super routers, it's still a good idea to prevent an
outage anywhere in the network from causing network wide event i.e. to
localize the problem. A giant flat IGP area in a large network does not help
achieving fault isolation.
--Jessica
