[c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?

[Mark Tinka]

I think it's less about just the forwarding chips and more about an
entire solution that someone can go and buy without having to fiddle
with it.

You remember the saying, "Gone are the days when men were men and wrote
their own drivers"? Well, running a network is a full-time job, without
having to learn how to code for hardware and protocols.

There are many start-ups that are working off of commodity chips and
commodity face plates. Building software for those disparate hardware
systems, and then developing the software so that it can be used in
commercial deployments is non-trivial. That is the leverage Cisco,
Juniper, Nokia... even Huawei, have, and they won't let us forget it.

Then again, if one's vision is bold enough, they could play the long
game, start now, patiently build, and then come at us in 8 or so years.
Because the market, surely, can't continue at the rate we are currently
going. Everything else around us is dropping in price and revenue, and
yet traditional routing and switching equipment continues to stay the
same, if not increase. That's broken!`

Mark.

On 19/Jun/20 13:25, Robert Raszuk wrote:
> But talking about commodity isn't this mainly Broadcom ? And is there
> single chip there which does not support line rate IP ? Or is there any
> chip which supports MPLS and cost less then IP/MPLS one ?
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 1:22 PM Benny Lyne Amorsen via cisco-nsp <
> cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Benny Lyne Amorsen <benny+usenet at amorsen.dk>
>> To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
>> Cc:
>> Bcc:
>> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:12:06 +0200
>> Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?
>> Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> writes:
>>
>>> This is simply not fundamentally true, it may be true due to market
>>> perversion. But give student homework to design label switching chip
>>> and IPv6 switching chip, and you'll use less silicon for the label
>>> switching chip. And of course you spend less overhead on the tunnel.
>> What you say is obviously true.
>>
>> However, no one AFAIK makes an MPLS switch at prices comparable to basic
>> layer 3 IPv6 switches. You can argue that it is a market failure as much
>> as you want, but I can only buy what is on the market. According to the
>> market, MPLS is strictly Service Provider, with the accompanying Service
>> Provider markup (and then ridiculous discounts to make the prices seem
>> reasonable). Enterprise and datacenter are not generally using MPLS, and
>> I can only look on in envy at the prices of their equipment.
>>
>> There is room for a startup to rethink the service provider market by
>> using commodity enterprise equipment. Right now that means dumping MPLS,
>> since that is only available (if at all) at the most expensive license
>> level. Meanwhile you can get get low-scale BGPv6 and line-speed GRE with
>> commodity hardware without extra licenses.
>>
>> I am not saying that it will be easy to manage such a network, the
>> tooling for MPLS is vastly superior. I am merely saying that with just a
>> simple IPv6-to-the-edge network you can deliver similar services to an
>> MPLS-to-the-edge network at lower cost, if you can figure out how to
>> build the tooling.
>>
>> Per-packet overhead is hefty. Is that a problem today?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Benny Lyne Amorsen via cisco-nsp <cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net>
>> To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
>> Cc:
>> Bcc:
>> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:12:06 +0200
>> Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?
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