Hi,
I am also newbie poster so likewise plz be kind.
I tend to agree with the comments made so far, however depending upon
the business, budgets are not always available that might match the
requirements and hence I can to some degree understand the use of such
boxes for small organisations.
I would be interested to know how many "software" (for want of a better
description) routers are in live production in this kind of environment
i.e. the 99.9999% Uptime variety, from speaking to people albeit
randomly in data centres it would seem to be more common than one might
expect.
Also does anyone have any peering policies which would exclude peers
with "software" routers specifically, most have a requirement for the
ability to support stable BGP peering but I have not seen any specific
exclusions for such "devices"?
Mark
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Mark D. Kaye wrote:
I would be interested to know how many "software" (for want of a better
description) routers are in live production in this kind of environment
i.e. the 99.9999% Uptime variety, from speaking to people albeit
randomly in data centres it would seem to be more common than one might
expect.
With the prevalence of Metro Ethernet, I'd think it's probably a pretty
common thing. People run firewalls as routers (stuff like CheckPoint),
which is basically Linux or FreeBSD, although not with EGP/IGP.
Also does anyone have any peering policies which would exclude peers
with "software" routers specifically, most have a requirement for the
ability to support stable BGP peering but I have not seen any specific
exclusions for such "devices"?
MD5 authed BGP sessions might be an issue - At least with Linux it
requires a kernel patch (works for me). I'd peered with plenty of big
carriers with Linux stuff and they don't care. I probably have more
issues with a carrier I peer with who uses Juniper and feeds me my
prefixes at a rate of about 50/sec, rather than 2000/sec that I get from
others using Cisco (My gear is Cisco in this instance)
David
I would be interested to know how many "software" (for want of a better
description) routers are in live production in this kind of environment
i.e. the 99.9999% Uptime variety, from speaking to people albeit
randomly in data centres it would seem to be more common than one might
expect.
It is indeed very common. That is why there are several
implementations of BGP and routing software available.
These are used in dozens and dozens of commercial products
some of which are sold as IP routers, plain and simple.
In any case, 5 nines and 6 nines are not always what the
marketing department claims. They often exclude planned
maintenance periods so if you reboot once a week or you
have a crash after changing a config, that doesn't count
against the 5 nines. In addition, the 5 nines figure
generally applies to the network, not to individual devices
within it. Networks can be designed so that the failure
of a device does not cause a network outage.
This whole issue is so complex that you just can't
make blanket recommendations. Even the biggest networks
don't just buy and deploy big iron. They run every new
router model and software release through an extensive
battery of tests. Then they write operational guidelines
telling people which features can be used in which
situations. They do this to avoid crashes and network
outages because the big iron (Cisco/Juniper) simply
cannot provide that on its own.
A smart small company can get excellent results from
Linux routers (although I would take a serious look
at FreeBSD or OpenBSD for this). Process is as important
as hardware.
--Michael Dillon