Current recommendations for 2 x full bgp feed

George Bonser gbonser at seven.com
Sat May 7 18:14:51 UTC 2011


> 
> Can anyone give me their recommendation for current hardware to take 2
> x
> full BGP feeds over 1Gb/s ports with a third Gb port for the local
> network?
> 
> I did this about 6/7 years ago with a Cisco 7200VXR NPE300 256MB RAM
> but I'm guessing things have moved on???
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris

Things are about to get very different very quickly.  Assuming by full
BGP feed you mean both IPv4 and IPv6, you are soon going to need
something that takes >500,000 routes.  There are two reasons for this.
First as the larger blocks of v4 space become unavailable due to runout,
allocations of space will likely come as crumbs of smaller space.  For
example if someone requests a /16 they might get an equal amount of
space in a bundle of smaller blocks that are not contiguous and can't be
aggregated.  This is going to lead to an explosion of routes in the v4
table.

At the same time the number of v6 allocations is growing.  An IPv6 route
will require the resources of anywhere from two to four times the router
resources of an IPv4 route depending on vendor and configuration (some
will, by default, use out to 64-bits for routes but can be configured to
use the entire 128-bits).

I currently have 5642 IPv6 routes and 349979 IPv4 "best" routes
installed on one of my border routers.  Any router in a default-free
environment that will require dual-stacking will be required to support
the equivalent of 500,000 ipv4 routes soon. The >500,000 route
capability is a significant price point for many vendors.  How you
respond to this will depend on what kind of network you are (do you
provide transit services or are you an end network that uses multiple
transit providers for reliability?).






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