Subject: Re: [Idr] I-D Action: draft-ietf-idr-rs-bfd-02.txt
From: Gert Doering <[email-masked]>
To: Robert Raszuk <[email-masked]>
Cc: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>, idr wg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 22:26:56 +0100
List-Id: Inter-Domain Routing <idr.ietf.org>

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 09:09:11PM +0100, Robert Raszuk wrote:
> > - IXPs tend to get a rather entertaining mish-mash of equipment... and
> thus bugs.
> +
> > Please enlighten yourself what people use "as peering router" today :-)
> 
> While this is GROW question ... perhaps it would be very helpful to get
> some more real data on what type of routers customers of the IX use to peer
> within IX ? Why such equipment is considered at best as 2nd class citizen ?

"What people can afford, and which can barely keep up with the demand".

So, you'll still find Cisco Sup720 or Juniper MX80 as peering routers -
reliable workhorses as far as forwarding capacity is concerned, but CPU 
starved (= keep the number of BGP sessions down if you want any
semblance of stability), and unfortunately also with centralized BFD
(at least on the Cisco).

> For my BB IX peerings I would in fact put the best routers to peer outside
> of my network on the edge - not just some junk or homebrew bgp/igp.

If you keep buying "best of breed" boxes every 3 years, while the 
competition keeps chugging along with half the CAPEX needed, your
customers will wander over, and you'll have to reconsider.

For a "smallish" ISP over here, a "fat pipe" to an IXP is 10Gbit/s or
maybe 20 Gbit/s - so if you need to by a US$ 50k router for that,
every 3 years, it does quite add to the peering costs.

We typically have budget to forklift IXP routers every 8-10 years...
bandwidth growth isn't that fast anymore, so "nice and shiny" today
will be "old and crappy" in 6 years, but as long as it keeps working,
it will be kept around.

It's not like "peering routers are treated second-class", more like
"the market expects that this all costs nothing" - so *inside* the
networks, "proper routers" get replaced by "dumb and fast" P-routers
with little/no BGP, to save even more CAPEX.

Gert Doering
        -- NetMaster
-- 
have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?

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