Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?

Wed Sep 4 15:27:47 UTC 2002

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 05:30:46 -0400 (EDT), "jeffrey.arnold" <jba at 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.