[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: A Modest Proposal for an Alternate IPv6 Allocation Process

[Garry Dolley]

On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 11:06:32AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> I have a comment/question on this..
>
> It appears the central rationale for this policy assumes that most people 
> are going to want to filter incoming BGP announcements, presumably because 
> the BGP table is going to grow rapidly and they will otherwise run out of 
> ram in their routers.  Is this assumption realistic?

Very realistic.

> VISA and MasterCard corporation have devised systems that can handle
> hundreds of millions of non-contiguous credit card numbers coming in for 
> approvals, from every corner of the globe.  I therefore have an extremely 
> difficult time believing that it is impossible to build a router that 
> cannot handle, say, 10 or 20 million BGP routes.  I also have a difficult 
> time believing that this cannot be done for the $50K to
> $100K that Cisco and Juniper seem to think they can charge for a
> fully-optioned BGP router.

I have no data on the number of credit card transactions that get
processed per second.

But on modern Cisco hardware, we expect forwarding rates of at *least*
15 Mpps.  SUP720-3BXL advertises 400 Mpps in a 6509 chassis and a
720 Gbps backplane.

Software algorithms (that use regular RAM) can't achieve these
numbers.  The most I've seen is around 2-3 Mpps using very modern
hardware with FreeBSD.

> Today I can walk into the discount store and by a brand new PC with 2GB of 
> ram for under $350.  Yet, Cisco and Juniper are still including as
> standard ram amounts, miserable, paltry amounts far smaller than that.

Yes, but when we talk about # of routes supported in BGP on Cisco
hardware, we want those routes to be hardware accelerated.  This
requires TCAM, not RAM.  

This link was recently posted and is quite good:
http://www.pagiamtzis.com/cam/camintro.html

You can see why TCAM is much more expensive than RAM.

I can easily do millions of routes on my OpenBSD software router,
but the performance of this router is not sufficient for the core of
my network.  I need a hardware router.

-- 
Garry Dolley
ARP Networks, Inc. | http://www.arpnetworks.com | (818) 206-0181
Data center, VPS, and IP Transit solutions
Member Los Angeles County REACT, Unit 336 | WQGK336
Blog http://scie.nti.st