handling large numbers of EBGP peers

Wed Dec 10 19:11:57 UTC 1997

I've got a router on Mae West with an open peering policy that has
close to 70 peers.  I'm currently running gated on a P133 box and have
just increased the size of data structures as the number of peers
grew.  We are looking at going to a Cisco 7200 (with NPE200) or 7500
(with RSP4), but I haven't been able to determine weather these
routers will handle this many peers and still have room for expansion.
I've heard that Cisco IOS has a software limit, even if the RSPs can
handle it, but I haven't been able to tell what it was.  Are there
routers from other vendors out there handling large numbers of peers?

Our bandwidth is too low to want to consider putting a second router
on the NAP.  I've considered providing ebgp multihop peering to other
routers behind this one, but I haven't heard of others doing this sort
of thing on the NAP's before.  Of course, there are the route servers,
but I'm more interested in offering direct peering to anyone that
wants it.

I only have full routing tables coming in at 2 places in my network
and might anticipate having 8 - 10 IBGP peer sessions in addition to
external sessions.

Rob