[ppml] Policy Proposal 2007-6 - Abandoned

On May 22, 2007, at 5:10 PM, Alex wrote:
> I am boggled by this assertion. Did you really take responsibility for
> looking up how to change the IP address on whatever ancient  
> hardware and
> software each customer had colocated with you?

Is this painful?  I'm sorry, but wanting to avoid an hours worth of  
work does not justify the cost of upgrades that *EVERY* router with a  
full table would have to undertake.

Cost of an hours worth of time < $200k per big iron system * (number  
of big iron systems)

Seriously!  I can't believe that this keeps getting trotted out as  
"oh my god, the horror".  The real horror is the cost associated with  
upgrades so that there is more CAM/FIB/etc space on the line cards.

> Furthermore, did you not have
> customers who pushed back on this and were unhappy that you needed  
> to touch
> their machine?

We don't touch their machines.  And yes, people complained.  But the  
reality is that it only took them a few hours of work to do make the  
change, and thus it blows over.

> I congratulate you on your customer service. All I can say is, your
> experience does not match mine. When I had to renumber, it was  
> painful, and
> customers were unhappy, and a couple of them did leave shortly  
> thereafter -
> not of course admitting that the renumbering was the cause.

It wouldn't have been the only cause.  Not trying to be rude or pass  
judgement, but a customer won't leave you for only that reason.

> The real question, though, is: are you willing to do it all again  
> every few
> years when your upstream from whom you get PA space is bought,

Actually we did this to get rid of 12x blocks of PA space and  
consolidate into PI space.  However, we are a fairly large provider  
and we burn through space fairly quickly, even with *very* strict  
allocation policies.

> The real problem with lack of PI space is it
> removes freedom of choice from the little guy, which places  
> negotiating
> power in the hands of the big upstream providers.

Only if you are willing to hardcode your IP addresses into your  
applications.

I used to run "a little guy".  We could and did and would renumber  
within an hour.  We designed it that way so that any given provider's  
space could be dropped from use as needed.  Net cost of designing it  
that way... hard to guess.  It was a fairly trivial problem to  
solve.  Maybe 8 hours of work?  Thrown against all the work-years put  
into the colocation design, the service design, the redundancy setup  
it wasn't even  noticed.

FYI: for "little guy" I'm talking about an end customer.  If you are  
a provider who suballocates space then you would be multihomed and  
qualify for a large block and this conversation is irrelevant.

-- 
Jo Rhett
senior geek

Silicon Valley Colocation
Support Phone: 408-400-0550