[c-nsp] Number of route reflectors, best practice?

[Tony Varriale]

On 7/23/2011 3:01 PM, Peter Rathlev wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-07-21 at 22:22 +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
>> "Just because everybody else does it" is a no-go in my book :-) - we
>> currently have a design similar to your current design, that is, all
>> "core" routers (8) are full-meshed, and all "edge" routers in a given
>> POP use the "core" as RRs.  Edges have only edge-routes plus default,
>> so the computational effort on the RRs is not that bad.  And we don't
>> need extra boxes...
>>
>> If both cores fail in a POP, that POP is down anyway, and I don't need
>> to worry about RR reachability either.
> Those are compelling arguments, though I'm not sure we're big enough for
> that. The network is physically partial mesh, and the dozen PoPs aren't
> geographically hierarchical in relation to the main datacenters.
>
> Furthermore, we currently have a very collapsed design where the current
> RRs are also terminating "customer" (internal) networks. This has worked
> well for us, but it does present some interesting problems regarding
> scale and potential DoS.
>
> (Oh, and we were advised by expensive consultants to introduce seperate
> RRs. And buy Nexus.)
Assuming your network is of decent size I get the dedicated RRs.  But, 
I'm a little more curious as to the Nexus pitch. :)

Your consultants/partner not work with a lot of ISPs?  Or, thinking of 
doing something interesting with FabricPath?

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