On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 05:30:46 -0400 (EDT), "jeffrey.arnold" <jba@analogue.net> said:
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.
Thinking of it, I want to confirm, although we have only really used IBGP (including IMBGP, and doing MD5 authentication) and OSPF on those (please, no flames that you only need either of those :-). In this respect the Foundries have never been problematic, and I noticed they learned the full routing table much faster than our (old) C's upon startup. The only problem we had was that in our deployment we really needed MBGP, and that became available much later than originally announced. But when it came it instantly worked as advertised, at least as far as we tried.
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 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.
My main problem is that I find debugging protocol operation (such as PIM-SM) much more difficult than on Cisco. And you can't expect them to have as many resources to develop new feeeeatures all the time; and the ones that get the resources may not be those that are interesting to ISPs.
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.
Definitely agree. Also they start up incredibly fast, because the software is so small. So upgrading software on the box is relatively painless. -- Simon.