-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of jeffrey.arnold Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 5:31 AM To: Nanog Subject: Re: Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Deepak Jain wrote:
:: Boxes like Foundry, Extreme, Redback and many others all talk BGP :: (at least to a first approximation) but is their lack of use in :: the core/edge/CPE a lack of scale, stability, performance or just :: interest? ::
Foundry makes a very good, very stable bgp speaker. I've had them in my network alongside cisco's and juniper's for a couple of years now, and i've never run into any bgp implementation problems that i would consider major. A few annoying bugs here and there, but nothing significantly worse than C or J.
Beyond the fact that not too many people are familiar with foundry's gear, I tend to think that foundry has lost face in the service
Another box I personally feel is very overlooked is Riverstone. They make an excellent box, the CLI is incredible (especially for maintenance windows. When will Cisco learn to have a Scratchpad or a commit feature?), and all-in-all they are a very feature rich box. The only *major* problem I had to do with BGP actually was a fault of their being RFC-Compliant. I believe this was about a year ago, they dropped the peer on a bogus prefix, that was being carried throughout the net (Originating from a Qwest client if I remember correctly.) Then again, I believe this affected more vendors than just RS. Derek provider
world for non-bgp related issues. ACL problems and CAM size issues have come up in really large installs (multi GBps, hundreds of thousands of flows, etc). Foundry is also behind cisco and juniper in features - GRE and netflow/sflow come to mind.
The ACL and CAM issues are supposedly fixed in foundry's jetcore chipset boxes, but i haven't seen any of those yet. Sflow is now an option, and from what i hear, their implementation is very very good. Overall, foundry still makes a good box - when you figure in the cost factor, it becomes a great box.
I've also played with extreme, but the last i checked, they were *way* behind foundry/cisco/juniper in terms of their bgp stability and feature set. Overall my experience with extreme has not been a pleasant one. I know some people who love them however, so who knows. They seem to make good/fast layer 2 gear, but i've had some scary results with their layer 3 stuff.
-jba
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