[j-nsp] TCAM full on EX8200?

[Mark Tinka]

On Sunday, October 23, 2011 06:29:08 AM Richard A 
Steenbergen wrote:

> Eventually someone will come along and realize that there
> is an untapped market here, and then the promise of
> cheap label switching routers will be fulfilled.

Not sure whether you recall Cisco's ASR14000 which never 
made it onto the scene. The idea with this box was for it to 
be a cheaper cousin to the CRS, in some cases for networks 
that wanted to have cheaper, fast core routers with lower 
intelligence than the CRS.

Of course, that project got scrapped and Cisco instead 
replaced the ASR14000 with the FP-40 and FP-140 line cards 
for the CRS. The FP-* cards are cheaper than the MSC-* cards 
on the CRS, have smaller QoS queues, fewer edge features and 
lower 'pps' rates - all the attributes that "could" make a 
core router cheaper.

We use those for our CRS deployments, and while they're 
certainly cheaper than the MSC-* cards, I hope their price 
continues to reduce, especially as 40Gbps and 100Gbps 
Ethernet takes off.

> IMHO
> the reasons this hasn't happened yet are a) only
> Cisco/Juniper *REALLY* have a good handle on the
> software side of MPLS, and b) not enough non-carriers
> are currently running (or even currently able to
> conceptualize running) label-only cores. Of course the
> large carriers with the most to gain also tend to be the
> least innovative and the most unwilling to consider cost
> when designing their architecture, until they go
> bankrupt of course. :)

This is most true - it's the largest carriers for whom these 
features/capabilities have been developed that will be the 
most unlikely to implement them :-).

We've been running BGP-free cores since the Cisco 7200 
router was our core device. But that's also probably because 
we were small enough, back then, to not be encumbered by the 
politics and bureaucracy of such a decision. Fortunately, 
that has gone on even as we grew over the years, and never 
having to worry about BGP routes eating up FIB's in our core 
means we can still maintain the oldest kit in some parts of 
the network until something more viable comes along.

Mark.
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