e300 vs mx240 for border router ?

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1

Hey nanog-izens

So for routers that are touching our transit and (hopefully soon) future peering, we're looking at both the force10 e300's and juniper mx240's. The e300's are cheap but I have heard some rumors/talk of falling over when it has to deal with large numbers of prefixes and routes? The mx240's are nice but the cost difference is enormous. Does anyone have experience with e300's running into issues with large routing tables? Are there any tricks/tips that work around any issues (if they exist?)

Thanks in advance

Leslie

2

How many BGP sessions will you run on these routers?

Sincerely,

David Kotlerewsky,
Sr. Network Engineer

3

Thanks to everyone who wrote back privately --

I also didn't know that force10 now has dual-cam linecards which raises the amount of routes it can handle

Leslie wrote:

4

Leslie,

Can you summarize any other info you may have learned in the private
responses for the benefit of those that are interested ?

I am not at all familiar with the Force10s, am buying new border routers
now.

Thanks,
Mike

5

Have you tried 3Com's 6040 / MSR-50 routers?

Regards

Ubaidali Abdul Razack
+65.65436404 (Office)
+65.65436278 (Fax)

Michael J McCafferty <mike@m5computersecurity.com>
12/13/2008 06:37 AM

To
nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
cc

Subject
Re: e300 vs mx240 for border router ?

Leslie,

Can you summarize any other info you may have learned in the private
responses for the benefit of those that are interested ?

I am not at all familiar with the Force10s, am buying new border routers
now.

Thanks,
Mike

Thanks to everyone who wrote back privately --

I also didn't know that force10 now has dual-cam linecards which raises
the amount of routes it can handle

Leslie wrote:
> Hey nanog-izens
>
> So for routers that are touching our transit and (hopefully soon)

future

> peering, we're looking at both the force10 e300's and juniper mx240's.

> The e300's are cheap but I have heard some rumors/talk of falling over

> when it has to deal with large numbers of prefixes and routes? The
> mx240's are nice but the cost difference is enormous. Does anyone

have

6

Ubaidali_Abdul_Razack@3com.com wrote:

Have you tried 3Com's 6040 / MSR-50 routers?

No offense / no flame, but really, do you actually compare 3Com with Juniper ?

7

Patriotism :slight_smile:

8

OpenBGPd on OpenBSD worth a try then :slight_smile:

Cheers.

9

OpenBGPd has a couple of cool things, notably irr-filter. However, it cannot choose best path based on IGP metric to reach the BGP next hop. When you have multiple border routers with multiple routers between them this is really annoying.
As OpenBGPd and OpenOSPFd are different daemons and the OS[1] has no concept of metric, it doesn't work so well.

Until it can do this, I'm sticking with Quagga for host based routers.
Useful for route servers at an IXP though (if your IXP has route-servers) - irr-filter is very useful here.

It also did this weird thing where I'd route 2002::/16 at an stf(6to4) interface and OpenBGPd would do a recursive lookup and install the route with a next-hop of my local interface, or something weird like that. Quagga did what I expected so I stuck with it.