Vyatta as a BRAS

Tue Jul 13 22:08:30 UTC 2010

On 7/13/10 10:56 AM, Dobbins, Roland wrote:
> 
> On Jul 14, 2010, at 12:39 AM, <khatfield at socllc.net>
> <khatfield at socllc.net> wrote:
> 
>> I haven't done real world testing with Vyatta but we consistently
>> pass 750KPPS+ without the slightest hiccup on our FreeBSD routing
>> systems.
> 
> 750kpps packeting the box itself?
> 
> Also, note that kpps is a small amount of traffic, compared to what
> even very small botnets can dish out.

I work for Vyatta.  We regularly see 700+kpps per core using a Nehalem
class cpu with higher rates possible in tuned systems.  On a multi-core
system this translates to a fairly high level of throughput.  To echo an
earlier post, Linux can comfortably handle gigabit.

It wasn't too long ago that this wasn't the case.  The growth in the
number of cores available to the end user, the introduction of
multi-queue nics, the move away from the FSB architecture towards QPI,
ever faster PCIe...  The technology is directionally trending towards
faster, more consistent network throughputs whether your Linux host is
acting as a router, firewall, web server, or whatever.  There are
activities taking place on the software front as well to increase speed
and consistency in the realms of forwarding and firewall, including
technologies that separate the control and forwarding planes.  There is
still headroom available in commodity compute to scale further.

I will be the first to admit that Vyatta won't work for everyone.  We
still have a lot of work to do for our system to fit seamlessly in some
environments.  But, the bet that we have made is that commodity compute
coupled with the amazing OSS dev community can keep pace with a good
portion of the networking worlds needs.  So far, that bet looks like a
good one.

To discount all software routing running on general purpose processors
as being antiquated seems to me to be premature, especially given the
various vendors interests as more functionality migrates into the cloud.
 As that happens commodity components in the cloud fabric will
necessarily need to behave more like network appliances.

Cheers,
Robert.