[53224] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: number of hops != performance
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mikael Abrahamsson)
Tue Nov 5 17:28:03 2002
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 23:25:10 +0100 (CET)
From: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <040a01c28508$4ddd5a60$862a40c1@PHE>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Petri Helenius wrote:
> If your L3 topology is well aligned with your L1 topology, you usually
> end up with more hops. The less intermediate gear, like SONET you
> use but do L3 instead, the more L3 hops you have.
This is exactly what we do, we run L3 pretty much directly on the fiber
with some OEO-repeaters in between, therefore we display much of our
infrastructure in a traceroute. We can do a L2 hop instead, that will
probably make things less efficient in some cases and will hide the
underlying infrastructure, but will make customers happy. I don't like to
do silly technical suboptimisations for cosmetical reasons.
> > B) you have more places for things to go wrong in both hardware and
> > software.
>
> This is specifically true for the hop-hiders using MPLS or other mostly
> pointless multihop recursive switching systems.
Quite true. I mean, either the equipment does an L2 or an L3 hop, either
way it can go wrong.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
