[c-nsp] Cisco PfR

[Eric Hileman]

Hi All!

 

Our particular situation is that we are moving into a carrier neutral
facility (Equinix).  We're getting transit through 4 tier 1 providers. Our
goals are:

 

#1 Minimize down town by proactively detecting and routing around black
holes and brown outs.

#2 Detect and use the best performing routes based on lowest latency,
jitter, packet loss and stability.

#3 Use cost as a tie breaker in the event of all other metrics being equal
(ie cheapest provider).

 

We are starting with 4 x fast ethernet copper feeds, 10 meg commit, 100
burst.  Our aggregate is low, around 20 meg.  We expect to outgrow this
within 6 months but obviously have a very (very) small budget to start with.
While we have some cisco experience our primary love is for Juniper.

 

We had 2 x j6350's ready and while researching bgp and our top 3 concerns we
travelled down a worm hole.  It was there we discovered solutions like the
Internap FCP, which we demo'd.  However this is a 50k+ device!  We searched
and searched for a cheaper alternative and that's when we hit on Cisco OER
and then PfR.

 

Our research indicates it meets our requirements so we started putting
together a router solution and found some interesting info:

 

1) PfR uses a master and border topology.

2) One master can control multiple borders.

3) Master and border can be on the same device.

 

However, the 6500/7600 can only be borders.  The 7200 can be master and
master/border.  So it looks like we'll go with the 7204vxr with a npe-g2
with 4 fast ethernet pa cards to start.  At the point we outgrow this we
will move it to a master and bring in a 6504-e with sup720-3bxl (or sup2t)
and configure as border to do the heavy lifting.

 

All indications from web searching and list searching indicates it should
work really well for this.  Although looking at the docs and lack of
how-to's on the net it would appear we have much to learn about configuring
it as we also lack knowledge of ip-sla which it uses.

 

The questions are:

 

Does this sound like we found the best solution in the cisco product line to
meet our current needs and future expansion?

 

Is anyone using Cisco Performance Routing (PfR) in a service provider
setting to optimize eBGP routing?  If so, could you share your experience?

 

We found the Design Guide, Product Page and FAQ.  Do you have any other
juicy links to PfR information like personal experiences, how-to's,
configuration examples?

 

 

Finally, if you made it this far, YOU ROCK!  Thank you :))