Residential CPE suggestions

Tue May 6 12:08:17 UTC 2014

It uses a Cavium Octeon processor which does have dedicated HW packet processing.  A moderate number of  prefixes won't slow it down doing vanilla forwarding, not sure about 2 million though...  I believe they have recently optimized some of the FW stuff to take advantage of the HW as well.  

Layering services like FW, NAT, and tunneling definitely drops the packet rate significantly, but it is still capable of 100+Mbps at IMIX packet sizes. 

I think there are a couple of in depth tests out there.

In my experience the ERL works really well for a $99 device. 

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco at ns.sol.net>
Sent: ‎5/‎6/‎2014 7:39 AM
To: "jared at puck.nether.net (Jared Mauch)" <jared at puck.nether.net (Jared Mauch)>
Cc: "NANOG" <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Residential CPE suggestions

> I was also going to recommend the EdgeRouter Pro as it has dual SFP =
> ports and the Vyatta/Linux stuff works quite well.
> 
> I suspect you will be very surprised with the quality experience.  If =
> you've not used Vyatta, it's very JunOS-like.

Does anyone have any practical experience with the EdgeRouter with a
largish number of prefixes?

http://dl.ubnt.com/datasheets/edgemax/EdgeRouter_DS.pdf

The "2 million+ packets per second" leads me to believe that this is
merely a highly optimized software based router, but under "Hardware
Specs" it specifically says "hardware acceleration for packet 
processing".

I have no idea what's being accelerated since the "layer 3 forwarding
performance" specs for the FR-8 are 2Mpps (an 800MHz CPU) and the 
FRPro-8 are 2.4Mpps (1GHz) which suggests software lookup.

Do these things suffer if you load them down with a full table?  Or
a handful of firewall rules?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
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