Low Cost 10G Router

Tue May 19 20:46:57 UTC 2015

On 2015-05-19 14:23, Pavel Odintsov wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Somebody definitely should build full feature router with 
> DPDK/netmap/pf_ring :)

Netmap yes. The rest no. Why? Because netmap supports libpcap, which 
means everything just works. Other solutions need porting.
You are going along, someone mentions a neat new libpcap based tool on 
NANOG and you want to try it out. If you've got DPDK/pf_ring, that means 
you are now having to port it. That's a fair amount of effort to just 
eval $COOL_NEW_TOOL.

> 
> I have finished detailed performance tests for all of them and could
> achieve wire speed forwarding (with simple packet rewrite and checksum
> calculation) with all of they.

With what features applied? DPDK with a fairly full feature set 
(firewall rules/dynamic routing/across a vpn tunnel/doing full l7 deep 
packet inspection) on straight commodity (something relatively recent 
gen xeon something many cores) hardware on $CERTAIN_POPULAR_RTOS seems 
to max out ~5gbps from what my local neighborhood network testing nerds 
tell me.

As always, your mileage will most certainly vary of course. The nice 
thing about commodity boxes is that you can just deploy the same "core 
kit" and scale it up/down (ram/cpu/redundant psu) at your favorite 
vendors procurement portal (oh hey $systems_purchaser , can you order a 
couple extra boxes with that next set of a dozen boxes your buying with 
this SKU and take it out of my budget? Thx).

You are still going to pay a pretty decent list price for boxes that can 
reasonably forward AND inspect/block/modify at anything approaching line 
rate over say 5gbps. Then you have things like the parallela board of 
course with it's FPGA. And you have CUDA cards. But staffing costs for 
someone who has FPGA(parallel in general)/sysadmin/netadmin skills.... 
well that's pricy (and you'll want a couple of those in house if you do 
this at any kind of scale). Or you could just contract them I suppose 
(say at like $700.00 per hour or so?, which is what I'd charge to be a 
one man FPGA coding SDN slinging band since it's sort of like catching 
unicorns) Course you could just have your jack of all trades in house 
sys/net ops person and contract coding skills as needed.

Don't think this will really save you money. It won't.

Buy a Juniper. Seriously.

(I have a 6509 in my house along with various switches/routers/wifi/voip 
phones (all cisco). I'm not anti cisco by any means). But they are 
expensive from what I hear. You get what you pay for though.

What it will get you, is a very powerful and flexible solution that lets 
you manage at hyperscale with a unified command/control plane. It's 
DEVOPS 2.0 (oooo I can fire my netadmins now like I fired my sysadmins 
after I gave dev full prod access? COOL!) (Yes I'm being incredibly 
sarcastic and don't actually believe that). :)

Also look at onepk from cisco. It's kinda cool if you want SDN without 
having to fully build your own kit.