[nsp] From the baby to the beast

[Darren Smith]

Hi folks

After a bit of advice here :-)

We currently have Cisco 7401's as our edge routers, backhauling traffic back
to a pair of Cat6509's & SUP2's.

One of the projects this year will involve accounting, i'm assuming via
NETFLOW (unless theres a better way to do it?)

Basically I need to analyse traffic from thousands of endpoints to the few
hundred servers connected the the 6509's.

In a near-to-realtime basis if possible :-(

It works fine with small traffic volumes (200mb peak between all edges) but
they're looking at expanding this to over 800Mb/sec, at which point my ickle
7401's will surely die ;-)

To make matters worse it's gaming type traffic, so small packet sizes and
high pps counts.

So two questions (well three really i suppose) :-)

1. Has anyone actually got netflow accounting working on Cisco 6509's?
reliably?

2. If I went down the GSR route, how does that handle netflow? (It's sampled
isn't it?) and how much different is a GSR to traditional Cisco routers (i.e
much to learn? - I've used 7xxx/65xx/58xx equipment so far).

The last question is one that might be better suited to offlist, so I don't
cause a riot :-) (i.e Would you even look at Cisco? What about Juniper?)

Any thoughts?

Regards

Darren Smith
Game Digital Ltd