Pushing Packets
June 20, 2007 by Will Charnock, Technology in Tech Stuff
A couple of weeks ago I finished reading a book called Pushing Ice (by Alistair Reynolds). It’s a hardcore sci-fi novel that follows a team of comet miners as they’re asked to push beyond their normal mission to explore strange happenings with one of the moons of Saturn, and how their work affects the galaxy. One of the more intriguing plotlines is how no matter what obstacles they face, the group is able to fall back on their motto - “We push ice, it’s what we do.”
As you may have seen, we’ve recently announced that we now have in excess of 100GB of transit Internet capacity. This is a staggering amount of bandwidth, and thinking back to just 4 or 5 years ago I never really envisioned that we would need that kind of capacity.
But these days I talk to vendors in terms of 10G ports (it was 1G ports as late as a year ago), and I’m now starting to look at the 100G standards that are being developed and trying to figure out when I’ll be able to evaluate and deploy them into our network.
Internet bandwidth growth has been on a nearly exponential growth curve for years, and as our connections get larger the threats we have to deal with get larger as well. We’ve seen DDOS attacks that exceed 10Gbps in the last few months, and other attacks that have been as large as 6-8Mpps. Attacks of this scale would have crippled backbone networks just a few years ago, but these days they simply raise eyebrows.
I’ve read many articles about the approaching Internet crunch - and how the Internet is just a few steps away from a massive implosion. These kind of articles seem to pop up every year or two - and every time I see them I chuckle. It reminds me of the doomsday predictions of Y2K - and what a non-event that was. The simple fact is that contrary to what some of these reports seem to indicate, there are a lot of smart people out there working on solving some of the problems before they manifest.
This is not to say that there aren’t issues out there. I recently wrote about ARIN’s declaration regarding IPv4 space exhaustion, and the need for providers to start looking at moving to IPv6. This issue poses some serious problems for all Internet users. Perhaps it’s my inherent trust in man’s ability to overcome any issues that he encounters through his ingenuity but I don’t see this as a doomsday scenario but rather as a great challenge that we can and will deal with and overcome.
This brings be back to my opening. As network engineers we’re constantly faced with daunting issues related to scale and traffic growth. The Internet routing table is now over 240,000 routes (it was less than 40,000 just 10 years ago) and the bigger that routing table gets, the more we have to squeeze out of our routers to accommodate the growth. No matter what dire predictions are made, or obstacles we encounter out there, we’ll just keep pushing packets, because that’s what we do.
