In article <cistron.20020904074946.GA84187@dataloss.nl>, Peter van Dijk <peter@dataloss.nl> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:39:25AM -0400, Deepak Jain wrote: [snip]
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?
One Dutch ISP that shall remain unnamed (and is not one I work for or have worked for) deployed Extreme on AMS-IX, with Extreme's BGP implementation.
It broke horribly. The Extreme BGP implementation, instead of sending their peers just their own prefixes, would send each peer *all* prefixes and then withdraw all but their own networks. However, doing this with tens of peers at the same time was too much for the Extreme itself, which died.
OTOH, I know of other ISPs also present on the AMS-IX that have been using Extreme switches to connect to the AMS-IX and their upstreams without any of those problems. Their network has been very stable for over a year now, I think. It's even a fault-tolerant setup with VRRP. Cistron IP is using a Foundry switch right now as core router. You can't get a BGP/OSPF router with lots of GigE and 10/100 interfaces for that price over at C or J .. We had some problems with instability at first, but with recent firmware everything runs just fine. We have several full BGP upstreams and over a hundred of AMS-IX peers (at GigE) and it works fine. On of the nicest things is that the box boots in 15 seconds or so and even with >100 BGP sessions coming up simultaneously it's still fast - a Cisco would take minutes to get all BGP sessions up, the Foundry does it in mere seconds. Mike.