HP HSR Routers

Does anyone deploy HP HSR routers for full BGP routing? Looks like they
have couple of routers that can hold 4 Million IPv4 routes, and do full BGP
routing. I did no even know that HP had routers of this size.

I read this post on Reddit, and it said the following:

I would suggest looking at the HP routing line, in North America for some
reason people over look them (HP's ability to get the message out is not
stellar). The HSR 6602-XG will push 15 Mpps with routing table sizes of
4mil (ipv4) and 2mil (ipv6) there is no additional licensing for any
feature you want to use. With respect to implementation I have always felt
if you understand the protocol who gives a damn about the syntax... The MSR
4060 will handle 36 Mpps with table sizes of 1mil (ipv4) and 1mil (ipv6).
Either solution will be cost effective.

The person I heard about HP from manages a direct peer as a transit AS to
hurricane electric with dual 10G Ethernet with a HSR 6800 (420Mpps) the
throughput and feature set on their product is unreal.

In a municipality's network for peering I purchased an ASR for the main
site prior to learning about the MSR/HSR line and just put in a 4060 for
the secondary and tertiary site they work like a charm. I think the total
cost per 4060 with redundant MPU's / Power Supplies / 4 port Gig T HIMM
card and 5years of support was like $15k (CDN) so like $25 USD... and not
only do they go toe to toe with the QFP in the ASR for performance but I
can terminate ipsec tunnels without shelling out an addition $20k!! or I
can redistribute into MPBGP from my IGP without shelling out an additional
20K for the IP Enterprise liscense!! :smiley:

I would at least check em' out.

Oh last thing the routers support IRF which is the HP spin on RSMLT for
fabric creation (think VSS without the arbitrary limitations on which line
cards will be a/a or a/p (looking at you FWSM and IDSM) so you can
effectively have millisecond convergence across the routers... Also Comware
is modular so the OS is identical across all products, which is kind of
nice because with an ASR you have crap like VASI groups which only exist in
the ASR so ya that was fun....

https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/347e74/costefficient_peering_router/

Are you sure that's forwarding table size, not routing table size?

There are lots of platforms that will have large RIB but a lot smaller FIB.

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04111660.pdf?ver=23

"HP 6600 Router Series"

"Routing table size 1000000 entries (IPv4), 300000 entries (IPv6)
Forwarding table size 1000000 entries (IPv4), 100000 entries (IPv6)"

I don't know if there is a typo somewhere, but it shows the difference between RIB and FIB.

Hi Colton,

My bet is that there's no TCAM. That or they're being cagey about
their hardware architecture since I can't find a single document about
the router that even mentions TCAM. Instead I'd bet they're doing
software routing (radix tree) spread over "32 hardware threads" and as
long as the bulk of your destinations are in small enough parts of the
tree to fit cleanly in to the processor caches you'll get "up to 15
Mpps".

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04111430&doctype=quickspecs&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=us&lc=en

If I'm right (I'm making guesses after all) then you should compare
HP's offering with software-based routers from other vendors rather
than comparing against routers which have a hardware fast path.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

Its is for the routing table. Check out this datasheet:

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-5672ENW&doctype=data%20sheet&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=us&lc=en
Page 7

Performance Throughput up to 120 million pps up to 240 million pps up to
420 million pps Routing table size 4000000 entries (IPv4), 2000000 entries
(IPv6) 4000000 entries (IPv4), 2000000 entries (IPv6) 4000000 entries
(IPv4), 2000000 entries (IPv6) Forwarding table size 1000000 entries
(IPv4), 1000000 entries (IPv6) 1000000 entries (IPv4), 1000000 entries
(IPv6) 1000000 entries (IPv4), 1000000 entries (IPv6) Backplane bandwidth
1024 Gb/s 1024 Gb/s 2048 Gb/s

I don't see TCAM listed either, but as large as HP is I assume they can
afford and use TCAM in their larger routers.