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

[Tim Durack]

If y'all can deal with the BU, the Cat9k family is looking half-decent:
MPLS PE/P, BGP L3VPN, BGP EVPN (VXLAN dataplane not MPLS) etc.
UADP programmable pipeline ASIC, FIB ~200k, E-LLW, mandatory DNA license
now covers software support...

Of course you do have to deal with a BU that lives in a parallel universe
(SDA, LISP, NEAT etc) - but the hardware is the right price-perf, and
IOS-XE is tolerable.

No large FIB today, but Cisco appears to be headed towards "Silicon One"
for all of their platforms: RTC ASIC strapped over some HBM. The strategy
is interesting: sell it as a chip, sell it whitebox, sell it fully packaged.

YMMV

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 7:40 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:

> 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> <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> <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> <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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-- 
Tim:>