Thread: Which border router?

In a few months I'm moving all of my kit to a new physical DC site and now when doing this I thought I would take the advantage to do the network better. Currently I class myself as a "colo" client. I've basically got 100mbit drop which goes into a Cisco 2950 and out from there. All works, no complaints.

However with the move I'm going to be getting a lot more bandwidth for the same money and will be offering a lot higher bandwidth products (i.e. 10mbit unmetered servers). Also I want to increase my control over the network and have the ability to start offering hardware packet filtering, null route on my side of the 100mbit drop, and maybe upgrade to 1Gbit down the line.

However I'm a total newbie at this (and most likely will outsource the end managment to the DC itself) however I'm trying to find out what is a good choose for the border router. I won't need BGP as I will be taking the mix directly from the DC but I guess at this level the router would support it.

So what would people advise as a good stable choice? So far a Cisco 6500 with a SUP 720 upgrade, or a Cisco 7200 has been suggested. Guestimated traffic will start off at 50mbit but will grow to 100 or so in a few months.

Why not a Linux box with some software on it? Will I be shooting myself in the foot? Like all things cost is an issue however I know this is a 10p and sticky tape fix.

Rus

What kind of routing are you going to do? If you take 180k-odd routes you'll need something pretty serious, otherwise you have lots of good options available to you that are hardware based and good value.

If you're taking a static feed, then pretty much any chasis based Layer3 switch with a decent CPU is going to be able to handle the task easily - unless you plan on attracting lots of DoS attacks, in which case a flow based device is going to let you down in the end.