Redundant BGP for lower cost

Alex Thurlow alex at blastro.com
Thu Mar 4 17:17:03 UTC 2010


Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a full time network admin, 
but we're a small company and I'm the only one handling this.  Our 
budget is also not huge, but we're at the point where extended downtime 
would cost us enough money that we can spend some money to fix the problem.

  Here's my situation:  I have two providers, each handing me gigabit 
ethernet.  I'm getting full BGP feeds and handling them with a 
Linux/Quagga router.  We max out at about 100kpps, as we're mostly 
pushing video which gives us a large packet size.  It works fine, and 
I've been happy with it so far.  But, we've gotten to the point where I 
want a backup router of some sort in case something happens to that one, 
what with the fans and disks that could fail.  I see a few options.

1. Just set up another Quagga box and use keepalived or some other HA 
solution.
2. Buy a Cisco/Juniper/whatever and then have the Quagga box as backup.
3. I have a 6500 behind the router that's just doing switching.  Could I 
have something switch that to static route all traffic to one of my 
providers if something happened to the router?  The 6500 has Sup1A with 
MSFC2 running IOS native.

On the Cisco side, I see that we could probably run a 7200VXR with 
NPE-G1 (about $6000 on ebay).  Moving to the Sup720, even used is 
probably out of our price range.

What do you guys think I should use here?

Thanks,
Alex





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