Re: What is the limit? (was RE: multi-homing fixes)

[Leo Bicknell <bicknell () ufp org>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 04:57:27PM -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> :) That was in the original Pluris presentations.  Then the race against
> competition forced to go to specialized design.  Density & power
> parameters were simply uncompetitive for off-the-shelf parts-only designs,
> as compared to large Cisco and Juniper boxes.

This is too good, I get to use an amazing analogy.

Routers power and heat are growing like the routing table.

POP power and AC are growing like the routers.

Ha!  Clearly the largest of the new routers have huge space/power/heat
issues.  Consider a box with 256-1024 OC-48 interfaces in a single
rack.  It's going to be tall, and deep, and suck power like nobodys
business and turn it all into heat.  Sure, big hosts are power and
space monsters (anyone have a water cooled IBM mainframe in their
basement?), but I fear the routers are going to zoom right past them.
In fact, I predict power may be a huge limiting factor to the growth
of the Internet in the not too distant future.

> Cannot say about other designs, but Pluris has distributed redundant
> control (i.e. each bay has its own control cards).  This is no different
> from the redundancy point of view from clustered routers.  A lot more
> manageable, though, since all those controller cards are synchronized
> configuration-wise.

I'm not saying I wouldn't buy one, or don't think they are safe,
but they have to live up to a different standard.  Think about
accident investigation for a car crash vrs an airplane crash.  If
you want a provider to trust a large, tightly coupled system you
need to provide airplane accident like support when it breaks,
that's all.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bicknell () ufp org
Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request () tmbg org, www.tmbg.org