Re: scaling linux-based router hardware recommendations

[David bass <davidbass570 () gmail com>]

I'm also in the research stage of building our own router.  I'm interested in reading more if you can post links to 
some of this research and/or testing. 

David

Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 26, 2015, at 6:45 PM, Phil Bedard <bedard.phil () gmail com> wrote:
>
> Kind of unsurprisingly, the traditional network vendors are somewhat at 
> the forefront of pushing what an x86 server can do as well.  Brocade 
> (Vyatta), Juniper, and Alcatel-Lucent all have virtualized routers using 
> Intel's DPDK pushing 5M+ PPS at this point.  They are all also tweaking 
> what Intel is providing, and they are the ones with lots of software 
> developers with a lot of hardware and network programming experience.  
>
> ALU claims to be able to get 160Gbps full duplex through a 2RU server with 
> 16x10G interfaces and two 10-core latest-gen Xeon processors.  Of course 
> that's probably at 9000 byte packet sizes, but at Imix type traffic it's 
> probably still pushing 60-70Gbps.  They have a demo of lots of them in a 
> single rack managed as a single router pushing Tbps.  
>
> A commerical offering you are going to pay for that kind of performance 
> and the control plane software.  Over time though you'll see the DPDK type 
> enhancements make it into standard OS stacks.   Other options include 
> servers with integrated network processors or NPs on a PCI card, there is 
> a whole rash of those type of devices out there now and coming out.  
>
> Phil 
>
>
>
> > On 1/26/15, 22:53, "micah anderson" <micah () riseup net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I know that specially programmed ASICs on dedicated hardware like Cisco,
> > Juniper, etc. are going to always outperform a general purpose server
> > running gnu/linux, *bsd... but I find the idea of trying to use
> > proprietary, NSA-backdoored devices difficult to accept, especially when
> > I don't have the budget for it.
> >
> > I've noticed that even with a relatively modern system (supermicro with
> > a 4 core 1265LV2 CPU, with a 9MB cache, Intel E1G44HTBLK Server
> > adapters, and 16gig of ram, you still tend to get high percentage of
> > time working on softirqs on all the CPUs when pps reaches somewhere
> > around 60-70k, and the traffic approaching 600-900mbit/sec (during a
> > DDoS, such hardware cannot typically cope).
> >
> > It seems like finding hardware more optimized for very high packet per
> > second counts would be a good thing to do. I just have no idea what is
> > out there that could meet these goals. I'm unsure if faster CPUs, or
> > more CPUs is really the problem, or networking cards, or just plain old
> > fashioned tuning.
> >
> > Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome!
> > micah