[f-nsp] MLX vs. TurboIron and Vyatta

[Greg Dok]

Hi People,

I am part of a group who currently brainstorm for a new Internet
Connectivity solution.

We are currently evaluating two options: “mass switching and standalone
BGP” vs. “mass routing capacity”, which in everybody language would
translate to do we buy a bunch of MLX chassis or do we focus on pure
switching capacity aka TurboIron and use Vyatta on the side to do the BGP
traffic engineering.

We currently operate our AS on 10 different locations, from which four are
major locations. On each site we have 2 upstream with full BGP routing
table and 2 upstream with partial BGP table, plus local private peering of
interest and customer downstream. Our network is fully consistent and fully
meshed. Each router iBGP peer with each other and we use is-is within the
network for capacity management. The is-is bit is easy, as it should not
suffer of scale issues and we can do all the QoS within IronWare, though
eBGP is the limitation to go ahead considering a global 10*2*350k +
10*2*120k + 10*50k total BGP routes, although by design BGP will only
advertise best routes to iBGP peers.

Now, the big question is the financial investment of an MLX platform full
10 GbE vs. a switching capacity and a bunch of x86 boxes for the BGP job.
This is basically what retains us from just buying and going the easy way.
Though we understand, Vyatta is pretty stable nowadays and would just work
well with next-hop attribute as long as the network don’t change too often.

We are now actively looking for experience and tips with both Vyatta +
TurboIron or any experience that would retain or encourage us to going
ahead.

Cheers,

Greg
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