Andreas Fink a écrit :
Thats probably the reason why on a NPE-300 processor you can not stick more than 512MB of RAM because it would not be fast enough to handle it anyway. So then you go and buy a NPE-G1 or now a NPE-G2 and you end up with a few thousand CHF bill.
Now multiply this with number of ISP's and BGP routers they have and you see the picture. Big ISP's will take care of the core routers, whatsoever as its their core business. But the multihomed customers at the other side of the planet now has to buy a new router just because you added one route more into the table. This is the global effect.
Hi all,
Talking about a small local ISP we helped put together, we used some relatively low-end pc's running OpenBSD+OpenBGPd on flashdist (openbsd read-only on DiskOnModule flash disk). This was about 3 years ago. The machine has a Celeron 2.4Ghz and 512Mb of RAM, and today, getting full routes from two upstreams, the machine is using 181Mb of RAM and itself routing about 300mbit/s of traffic ...
Try this with a three years old Cisco for less than CHF 2000.--
This hardware has been running flawlessly since beginning ...
I wouldn't recommend this setup for ultra-large networks (well ... why not ...). I mean as core BGP routers, why not, but probably not as edge. If you are getting close to fulling your available memory on your Cisco, you should try "offloading" the BGP work to a software router ... you can get quad core pc's with 4Gb of RAM and pci-express gbit for less than CHF 2000 ... buy two of them if you are worried ... we have the real world example ... it WORKS !
It is even getting easier today, have a look at Vyatta : http://www.vyatta.com/ or http://www.imagestream.com/, or try it yourself using OpenBGPd (highly recommended), Quagga or Xorp.