How cheap is cheap and what performance numbers are you looking for? About as cheap as you can get: For about $3,000 you can build a Supermicro OEM system with an 8-core Xeon E5 V3 and 4-port 10G Intel SFP+ NIC with 8G of RAM running VyOS. The pro is that BGP convergence time will be good (better than a 7200 VXR), and number of tables likely won't be a concern since RAM is cheap. The con is that you're not doing things in hardware, so you'll have higher latency, and your PPS will be lower. I haven't tried this configuration as a full router in production, but have been using them in a few places as a firewall solution and they've handled everything I've thrown their way so far. Initially, I had these in place as "low-capital" solutions that were going to be temporary so we could start building out a new environment and collect usage data to have real world sizing data for something like an ASA cluster, but they've worked so well that we've held off on that purchase for now (given challenging budget times in higher-education). The stability of VyOS has been good, and the image-based upgrade system has worked every time without issues for the past year or two (starting from 1.0.1 to the current 1.1.5). That said documentation for VyOS is poor, so you should be ready to dig into some source code or hit the IRC channel to get things running. Having a foundation with general Linux knowledge is helpful here too. If you just need a 10G link but only commit to 2-3G then this solution might be able to work well for you. If you need closer to line-rate 10G at small packet sizes then you might start running into performance limitations due to latency. If this is the case there is the Vyatta vRouter 5600 (VyOS is based on the GPL portions of the 5400), which claims to have Intel DPDK support and can handle multi-10G at line rate; but last time I checked it was really expensive ($10,000 per core or something ridiculous like that). In terms of commercial solutions, I think 10G and BGP are two things that don't combine well for "cheap". An ASR1K might do the trick, but more likely than not you're looking at an ASR9K if you want full tables; I don't have any experience with the 1K personally so I can't speak to that. The ASR 9K is a really great platform and is what we use for BGP here, but it's pretty much the opposite of cheap. As far as the firewall stuff goes, I have a draft of VyOS as a firewall that I've been wanting to put together (still needs work): http://soucy.org/vyos/UsingVyOSasaFirewall.pdf P.S. Sorry the documentation for VyOS is so bad, what's there so far in the User Guide is basically me trying to do a first pass in hopes that others would help out and there haven't been many updates. On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:
What options are available for a small, low cost router that has at least four 10G ports, and can handle full BGP routes? All that I know of are the Juniper MX80, and the Brocade CER line. What does Cisco and others have that compete with these two? Any other vendors besides Juniper, Brocade, and Cisco to look at?
-- Ray Patrick Soucy Network Engineer University of Maine System T: 207-561-3526 F: 207-561-3531 MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network www.maineren.net