Router for a file hosting service

Tue Sep 22 16:38:56 UTC 2009

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vasil Kolev [mailto:vasil at ludost.net]
> 
> What I need is something that can handle something like 24 10gbit ports
> - 10-12 to switches with the serving equipment (each one of them
> pushing around 8-9Gbit) and on the other side connected to a few ISPs,
> some of them with full tables, some of them just peering, and to push
> the 80-100Gbps around.
> (all traffic is TCP, live data says 8.4Gbps is around 1mpps)
> 
> Now this seems pretty straightforward, but there's a twist. Because of
> the nature of the app we need to be able to do some policy routing -
> the devices on the back should be able to set something in the packet
> (like the ToS field), and the outbound route preference to be picked
> based on that. We'll also need to push to the routes some idea on what
> to prefer for specific destinations (because we have some pretty good
> metrics on the backend on the packet loss to each destination).
> There's also the small issue of scrubbing the packets of the marker
> I've set on the backend, not to leak it, because it seems some people
> tend to do weird stuff with prioritization because of it (we had one
> case with BT, i think).
> Doing these two issues at wire speed doesn't seem to be covered in the
> documentation, or at least in what I found.
> 
> We've looked into cisco 7609 for this, but I've already read enough on
> this list that made me a bit wary of it (and after all the reading I'm
> still not sure how well would it handle the policy routing issue and
> the rest of the nasty things we're planning for it.
> 
> Any ideas or pointers?

Sounds like a Juniper MX480 would be a good fit for what you are trying to do.  It should support the port densities you are looking for, plus you can group several interfaces into common bridge groups.  Furthermore, you should be able to support full-route tables, perform Filter-Based Forwarding for policy routing, classification, queuing, re-marking, etc. all at line-rate, or pretty darn close.

Stefan Fouant 
Neustar, Inc. / Principal Engineer
46000 Center Oak Plaza Sterling, VA 20166
Office: +1.571.434.5656 ▫ Mobile: +1.202.210.2075 ▫ GPG ID: 0xB5E3803D ▫ stefan.fouant at neustar.biz