Re: Route reflector/server appliance for access router aggregation

[Andy Davidson <andy () nosignal org>]

On 13 Jul 2010, at 15:06, Jack Carrozzo wrote:

> On the subject of route reflection, I've run into a few people happy with
> Quaggo or openBGPd on intel hardware. You can throw a 1U box together with
> dual PSUs, a bunch of ram, and SSD/CF disks for far less than a C or J setup
> and won't be wasting money on ASICs you aren't using. If I recall correctly
> this is  what Any2 was using when I spoke to them some years ago, but
> perhaps someone here can offer more specifics.

A side note - There is not a total commonality of behaviour/featureset between a reflector service at an IXP, and on a 
single AS.  IXP route-servers tend to be deployed on pc servers, because the C and J units don't have features 
required[1] for IXP operation (unmodified AS-path, filtering between participants, multiple RIBs for shadow-free 
filtering.)

That's not to say that white-box solutions wont work well on your network.  It's easy to make the reflector highly 
available too - just run multiple reflectors, and build multiple adjacencies on your forwarding routers.


Andy


[1] Some slides on this topic should you be interested :

General explanation :
http://www.peering-forum.eu/epf3/presentations/day1/inex-epf-dublin-2008-09-15-01.pdf
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jasinska-ix-bgp-route-server-00

Further reading on specific implementations:
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog48/presentations/Monday/Jasinska_RouteServer_N48.pdf
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog48/presentations/Monday/Filip_BIRD_final_N48.pdf