Re: Redundant BGP for lower cost

[Jack Carrozzo <jack () crepinc com>]

If you want to keep it cheap, roll out another Quagga edge - one to each
peer. Drop default into OSPF from both edges, iBGP over a GE between them.
If one toasts you'll only lose half your routes for 1s-ish, or however long
you set your OSPF keepalives.

While you're at it, add extra fans and run the edge systems off solid state
disks or CF cards.

Or, buy $real hardware.

-Jack Carrozzo

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Alex Thurlow <alex () blastro com> wrote:

> Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a full time network admin, but
> we're a small company and I'm the only one handling this.  Our budget is
> also not huge, but we're at the point where extended downtime would cost us
> enough money that we can spend some money to fix the problem.
>
>  Here's my situation:  I have two providers, each handing me gigabit
> ethernet.  I'm getting full BGP feeds and handling them with a Linux/Quagga
> router.  We max out at about 100kpps, as we're mostly pushing video which
> gives us a large packet size.  It works fine, and I've been happy with it so
> far.  But, we've gotten to the point where I want a backup router of some
> sort in case something happens to that one, what with the fans and disks
> that could fail.  I see a few options.
>
> 1. Just set up another Quagga box and use keepalived or some other HA
> solution.
> 2. Buy a Cisco/Juniper/whatever and then have the Quagga box as backup.
> 3. I have a 6500 behind the router that's just doing switching.  Could I
> have something switch that to static route all traffic to one of my
> providers if something happened to the router?  The 6500 has Sup1A with
> MSFC2 running IOS native.
>
> On the Cisco side, I see that we could probably run a 7200VXR with NPE-G1
> (about $6000 on ebay).  Moving to the Sup720, even used is probably out of
> our price range.
>
> What do you guys think I should use here?
>
> Thanks,
> Alex