[mike_d]

A core or edge router in a terabit+ scale network is a far cry from getting someone in China to make you a bunch of Netgear clones.

The Cisco 5500 series chassis is about 21 rack units (or about 3 feet) tall to give you an idea of the scale of these devices in the real world. They are also jam packed with custom ASICs that allow packet switching at extremely high speeds, which would need to be redesigned to handle 16 byte addresses.

[oarsinsync]

> The Cisco 5500 series chassis is ... jam packed with custom ASICs

Assuming you’re talking about the NCS 5500, I thought the whole point of that platform was that it wasn’t using Cisco proprietary ASICS and was just using Broadcom chips with IOS-XR wedged on it anyway to give it the appearance of being a budget competitor to the ASR9K while lacking the majority of the feature set because ... it’s not using Cisco’s proprietary ASICS that support all those features.

Also, they have full ipv6 routing and switching support. So does the C6500, which is ancient (and still in production in many places)

[Dylan16807]

So tell your vendor you expect them to have that redesign in 4 years.

[lazide]

Fat lot of good that will do you with your project that needs to be completed next year or your company is hosed no? And once you do the fix - which won’t require ipv6 or will use a different vendor - then you won’t be talking to them anyway.

The underlying issue is that there is a lot of momentum with v4, and hacks mostly work and work faster and easier, so most people end up going that way. So it keeps the momentum.

And v6 has some serious second system syndrome going on (aka we’ll dramatically fix all the stuff we wanted to do better last time, ignoring real world constraints), and the adoption shows. It was clearly designed to be a either or replacement (aka cleanroom, start fresh with this), but that’s not how real world upgrades tend to work. I keep wanting to use v6, but every time I do, it quickly ends up having to get turned off because of something broken somewhere in some product I have little choice in using or interacting with and v4 (even with tons of terrible NAT) still keeps chugging along.

Momentum is shifting of course - this isn’t a steady state forever thing - but man, ugh.

[Dylan16807]

> Fat lot of good that will do you with your project that needs to be completed next year or your company is hosed no?

You can do both.

> And once you do the fix - which won’t require ipv6 or will use a different vendor - then you won’t be talking to them anyway.

It depends on whether you actually want to fix it.

> The underlying issue is that there is a lot of momentum with v4, and hacks mostly work and work faster and easier, so most people end up going that way. So it keeps the momentum.

Yes, which is very different from being unable to get the equipment you'd need.

[lazide]

That’s nice, but clearly not how the majority of the purchasing departments work right now, correct?

And if most people don’t buy that way - then it isn’t easy to get solid equipment that can do things that way - which makes it hard to get the equipment you need.

[Dylan16807]

> That’s nice, but clearly not how the majority of the purchasing departments work right now, correct?

The question was about what the company can do, talking about external constraints, so I don't really care how purchasing departments work for that topic.

> And if most people don’t buy that way - then it isn’t easy to get solid equipment that can do things that way - which makes it hard to get the equipment you need.

For smaller companies, yes. Except the argument was that smaller companies could get them already, while Amazon would exhaust the world supply.

Once we move into the realm of companies that make their own markets, it doesn't matter what "most people" do. Those companies can make their own choices and get whatever they want made.

[ikiris]

Most real large scale is actually white box clos switch networks.