Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?
It has been a long time since I have seen this thread hashed out, so I figured I'd bring it up publicly. Is anyone comfortable using (in a network with > 5 routers) any non-Cisco or non-Juniper routers for BGP speaking? (Zebra/Gated boxes only count if customer traffic is carried through the device). Historically, some networks have been big fans of Gated boxes and such because they were cheap and scalable to a point. Now many BGP speaking platforms are extremely inexpensive (even from CSCO and JNPR). I was wondering if the consensus has changed. 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? Thanks, Deepak
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. Extreme has supposedly fixed this bug, but this ISP switched to Juniper for routing.
From what I see around me, Juniper for routing and Extreme for switching is a popular combination. It seems both are considered to be good at one thing and bad at the other.
Greetz, Peter -- peter@dataloss.nl | http://www.dataloss.nl/ | Undernet:#clue
On Wed 04 Sep 2002 (09:49 +0200), Peter van Dijk 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.
And another NL ISP - Demon - has used: PC-based routers running gated. At low traffic volumes, they worked very well. A supplier I don't think I'm at liberty to name. When they were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad they were horrid. Another supplier I don't wish to name. Mostly worked, but crashed if you made even the slighest configuration change. We're now on Junipers and very happy. -- Jim Segrave jes@nl.demon.net
A supplier I don't think I'm at liberty to name. When they were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad they were horrid.
Another supplier I don't wish to name. Mostly worked, but crashed if you made even the slighest configuration change.
I'm guessing one of them is Ascend and the other Lucent :-) -- Neil J. McRae - Alive and Kicking neil@DOMINO.ORG
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 11:35:52AM +0100, Neil J. McRae wrote:
A supplier I don't think I'm at liberty to name. When they were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad they were horrid.
Another supplier I don't wish to name. Mostly worked, but crashed if you made even the slighest configuration change.
I'm guessing one of them is Ascend and the other Lucent :-)
I don't know the first one. You're wrong about the second one. [this bit is drifting offtopic :)] Greetz, Peter -- peter@dataloss.nl | http://www.dataloss.nl/ | Undernet:#clue
On Wed 04 Sep 2002 (11:35 +0100), Neil J. McRae wrote:
A supplier I don't think I'm at liberty to name. When they were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad they were horrid.
Another supplier I don't wish to name. Mostly worked, but crashed if you made even the slighest configuration change.
I'm guessing one of them is Ascend and the other Lucent :-)
No :-) -- Jim Segrave jes@nl.demon.net
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Peter van Dijk wrote:
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.
Then again, AMSIX and their Foundry's break every other day as well :) In their case, the while is definately noy more then the sum of their parts :) Paul
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Paul Wouters wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Peter van Dijk wrote:
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.
Then again, AMSIX and their Foundry's break every other day as well :)
The AMS-IX does not do BGP on their Foundry's (afaik l2 only) -- Sabri Berisha - www.cluecentral.net - "I route, therefore you are" - nooit meer naar Bonaire: http://nu.nl/document?n=59946 - "Waarom draait er een mailserver op die $mailserver?" - Pim van Pelt
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?
With Extreme, it's certainly (in my experience only) a matter of horrific stability in their routing engine: great switches, truly scary as routers. The thought of BGP on Extreme is almost comedic, considering I'm afraid of their RIP... Yours, J.A. Terranson
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 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 __ [jba@analogue.net] :: analogue.networks.nyc :: http://analogue.net
-----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
__ [jba@analogue.net] :: analogue.networks.nyc :: http://analogue.net
I have to second that. Riverstone is definitely a solid box. Featurewise, routing protocols are excellent, but services are not quite there. (I.E. it doesn't support any IP tunneling protocol in any shape or form. GRE is extremely useful under some circumstances, but sadly, not with riverstone). On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Derek Samford wrote:
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.
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.
I'm a big fan of both Foundry and Riverstone, as BGP speaking routers. I've had great luck with both. Foundry has some annoying bugs at first, but these seem to have been resolved. I recommend both. - Daniel Golding
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 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
__ [jba@analogue.net] :: analogue.networks.nyc :: http://analogue.net
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel Golding Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 1:23 PM To: jeffrey.arnold; Nanog Subject: RE: Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?
I'm a big fan of both Foundry and Riverstone, as BGP speaking routers. I've had great luck with both. Foundry has some annoying bugs at first, but these seem to have been resolved. I recommend both.
- Daniel Golding
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
I can't say personally I like the Foundry's. When I was testing (granted this was 2 years ago.) I saw some traffic when they were under near wireline load and holding full tables. I'm sure their vastly improved, just as Riverstone has. But Foundry's CLI just doesn't cut it for me. Again, the Foundry bias is fairly old, and I have a couple in the lab waiting for me to test new code. But I can't go back to their CLI after using RS for so long. 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
__ [jba@analogue.net] :: analogue.networks.nyc :: http://analogue.net
On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Deepak Jain wrote:
It has been a long time since I have seen this thread hashed out, so I figured I'd bring it up publicly.
Is anyone comfortable using (in a network with > 5 routers) any non-Cisco or non-Juniper routers for BGP speaking? (Zebra/Gated boxes only count if customer traffic is carried through the device).
I'm currently running Ciscos at the edge, but Extremes in the core for our datacenter hosting - iBGP only, mind. The Extremes are a little odd, in that one refuses to talk BGP at all (!) but other than that I've not had any real problems. Unless I had a specific reason not to use "known kit" (read: Juniper or Cisco) at the edge, I'd probably stick with the usual - but that's more out of familiarity than genuine worries. -- Patrick Evans, allegedly Email: pre@pre.org CV: no longer required Wheels: Kawasaki ZXR400L9 (stolen), Bandit 1200 (replacement, pending)
participants (13)
-
alex＠pilosoft.com -
Daniel Golding -
Deepak Jain -
Derek Samford -
J.A. Terranson -
jeffrey.arnold -
Jim Segrave -
neil＠DOMINO.ORG -
Patrick Evans -
Paul Wouters -
Peter van Dijk -
Sabri Berisha -
Simon Leinen