[ppml] HD Ratio and scaling issues (was Re: Proposed Policy...)

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

> That's true, but, I'm not at this point convinced that HD ratio
> is a meaningful solution to that problem.  I have long advocated
> that there are cases in which an LIR should be able to treat
> nodes as if they were individual sub-LIRs and justify space to
> ARIN on that basis.  When I was at Exodus, this was bad enough
> that we finally succumbed and paid multiple fees to ARIN to make
> each of our regions a separate LIR instead of being a single
> organization with a single allocation criteria.  However, I
> don't believe HD really addresses this issue.  I do believe
> that it rewards pathological inefficiencies as the one you describe
> above.

First, my comments were not intended to be an explanation
of why we need HD ratio for IPv4. I mainly tried to address
one question from Charles to illustrate the effects of
hierarchy. You seem to think that this illustrates pathological
inefficiency and prefer to see large numbers of routes
instead. But since we are talking about scaling issues here,
having a large number of internal routes is not necessarily
prudent or efficient in a large network.

I would really like to see you describe in more
detail your definition of pathological inefficiency
contrasted with ordinary inefficiency.

Also, I'd like to understand what were the issues that
you ran into at Exodus. Were they also scaling issues
in which the ARIN policies simply don't work for larger
networks?

--Michael Dillon