[c-nsp] 2821 performance as border router

[Paul Cairney]

Hi, apologies for yet another "what performance can I expect with an unknown traffic profile" post however there doesnt seem to be many references to real world performance of the 28xx platform in anything other than T3/E3 CPE roles. I would appreciate any comments on the suitability of this choice given the requirements below and also if anyone has operational experience of the 28xx platform in roles other than CPE/voice.


I am looking at using a pair of 2821's to act as border routers for a couple of sites, each taking two full tables from upstreams and having an iBGP session so would probably max the ram out at 1Gb.

Feature wise its fairly minimal, BGP/OSPF/HSRP with basic bogon filtering and ACL's on the management interface.

Traffic pattern is primarily HTTP/SMTP and obviously no level of DDoS protection is expected from this platform (so presumably most of the ISR type features such as IDS and firewalling will be turned off).


While Im sure many people will suggest 7200 platform the traffic is expected to be ~20mbit initialy and I would hope to be able to justify upgrades to something more useful like 6500/7200 before the traffic level approaches 100mbit. As it stands the 2821 appears to be a good fit for the initial low traffic requirement yet can take enough ram to be vaugly useful given the current table size.


What I am least clear on is what sort of performance to expect, consensus suggests it is more than happy with T3/E3 line rate even with cpu hungry features on. Obviously its not going to approach the 170k pps quoted by the marketing droids, but I would be interested to hear anyone doing > 100mbit on the 28xx platform.


Regards,

Paul