Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?

Wed Sep 4 09:30:46 UTC 2002

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

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