[48851] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: remember the "diameter of the internet"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin, Christian)
Tue Jun 18 17:44:08 2002
From: "Martin, Christian" <cmartin@gnilink.net>
To: 'Vadim Antonov' <avg@exigengroup.com>,
Jeff Harper <jharper@vzlink.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:43:38 -0400
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
>Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to
>figure out
>why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb
>TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual
>interfaces. Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.
When ANY router becomes as reliable as a dumb TDM device, then maybe we can
begin collapsing the POP topology. However, the very nature of the Internet
almost prevents this reliability from being achieved (having a shared
control and data plane seems to be the primary culprit). There are routers
out there today that can single-handedly replace entire POPs at a fraction
of the rack, power, and operational cost. Hasn't happened, tho.
I don't like wasting ports for redundant n^2 or log(n^2) interconnect
either, but router and reliability mix like oil and water...
My 2c.
-chris
>
>--vadim
>
>On 18 Jun 2002, Jeff Harper wrote:
>
>>
>> On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:34, brett watson wrote:
>>
>> > no, just lamenting the passing of an era. an era where we
>engineers
>> > cooperated, and "just fixed" the problems as they occured.
> and we didn't
>> > do things like this.
>>
>> Keep in mind the reason why the era passed. During that
>era, you had
>> top level, blue sky engineers. Now the field has been
>saturated by a
>> lot of less than desirable "engineers" out there (not
>calling you one
>> at
>> all) that ruined it for us all...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
