North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Software router state of the art

  • From: Andrew D Kirch
  • Date: Sat Jul 26 17:57:29 2008

Zed Usser wrote:
Hi all!

There's been some discussion on the list regarding software routers lately and this piqued my interest. Does anybody have any recent performance and capability statistics (eg. forwarding rates with full BGP tables and N ethernet interfaces) or any pointer to what the current state of art in software routers is?

- Zed
I'd like to be wrong, but there's no way that any PC/Commodity routing system is going to work (in any environment other than Ethernet). For the small ISP starting out (you know, the ones selling T1's/xDSL), there are no Channelized T3/OC3 cards available for a PeeCee, which means you still need to buy something from Cisco or Juniper. And the major carriers are already using Cisco/Juniper, because even at the price they charge they aren't unreasonable because they support their product. I don't care how many packets per second, or simultaneous route flows you can do if I can't plug anything besides Ethernet into it. If you can show me the hardware, great I'll take a look at it, otherwise these simply don't matter all that much.

Andrew