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The Green Hills GateD BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
module combines the greatest benefits of the latest technology with those
of long-term deployment. Green Hills chairs the Inter-Domain Routing
working group of the IETF (the working group of the IETF responsible
for the BGP standard), and this involvement has resulted in Green Hills’ BGP
becoming the reference implementation for new functionality. This means
that the latest, cuttingedge features are always available in Green Hills’ BGP.
These new features are balanced against the more than 20 years of deployment
of the BGP module in the Internet, dating from the days of the NSFNet,
ensuring levels of stability unattainable by other BGP implementation.
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The Border Gateway Protocol is exactly that: the protocol that speaks
between the gateways that sit on the borders
of separate administrative domains, which are referred to as Autonomous
Systems (ASes). Therefore, BGP is necessary for every device that sits
at the edge of an AS (typically a carrier or an enterprise) and needs
to support more than just a default route. Edge routers fall into this
category, as do firewalls and VPN delivery boxes.
Further, a requirement of the BGP specification is that all BGP speakers
within an AS be connected to each other. Because ASes are rarely small
enough to allow tunnels to be configured between every edge box, let
alone to have a naive full mesh, there’s an implication that I-BGP
(Internal BGP, a subset of the protocol for deployment within an AS)
be implemented on all IP-aware routers within a multi-homed AS. As a
result, there are actually very few boxes that can get away without including
BGP.
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Scalability
The scalability of BGP is critical, more so than with any other protocol.
The reasons for this are two-fold. First, BGP sits at the borders of
carriers. In that position, it is the only protocol directly susceptible
to the overall growth of the Internet. Second, it is a connection-oriented
protocol that relies on TCP. As a result, it may need to handle large
numbers of direct peers and potentially hold an entire copy of the
Internet routing table per peer. The Green Hills BGP module supports
hundreds of thousands of unique routes, millions of total route instances,
and hundreds of simultaneous peering sessions – numbers that
easily support today’s needs while providing seamless support
for future requirements.
Robustness
BGP was one of the first routing protocols available in GateD.
And GateD products have been powering the Internet since 1988 – longer
than any other commercially available routing stack.
Additionally, every Green Hills release is subjected to an extremely
sophisticated internal testing process that emphasizes the same techniques
used in carriers’ labs, ensuring:
- Stability and Robustness
- RFC Compliance
- Interoperability
Feature complete
The Green Hills BGP module is full featured. Beyond the basic BGP-4 functionality,
BGP includes support for all of the major additions to the protocol,
including new features such as graceful restart, route refresh, and
dynamic capability negotiation. More important than any of these, however,
is that “special sauce” beyond the RFCs, which makes a
BGP implementation truly deployable. Many of the features in this category,
such as AS-path stuffing, are fairly well known. Others are not documented
in the specifications and are only discovered after extensive interoperability
testing. Finally, some features, such as the policy engine, are often
underestimated in complexity. Green Hills’ BGP module is complete.
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Deployment
The growth of the Internet routing table and the need for scalable code
within a large carrier are well documented and rather intuitive. What
may not be obvious is that almost every box that deploys BGP is under
increasing demand for scalability. A Green Hills customer who makes
metropolitan area boxes recently required an urgent need to upgrade
to their BGP module; one of their customers was attempting hundreds
of simultaneous peering sessions, and a large order was riding on the
ability to meet this requirement. Green Hills’ BGP implementation
is scalable, and when it’s in your box, your product is saleable.
Increased revenue
There are tremendous profits to be made by delivering a box that
provides added value to a customer. But beyond the features and functionality
of the box, the “checklist” items are the dollars to be made
(or lost) through SLAs. These agreements are required more and more often
by enterprises and carriers, and in order to be able to deliver them
and reap the financial rewards, rock-solid software is required. It’s
often stated that no code is bug free. This may be true, but code that’s
been deployed in the harsh reality of the Internet for fifteen years
is unquestionably stable and robust.
Reduced time-to-market
One of the last steps in delivering a product to market is getting it
accepted by the customer. Box manufacturers today have a good understanding
of this process, and that’s why long before hardware is complete,
they will get their software into their customers’ hands for
testing.
GateD was deployed in the NSFNet. Today, the GateD BGP module is deployed
in more carriers and enterprises around the world than any other commercially
available BGP implementation.
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GateD platform independent scalable software has been ported, tested
and validated on Green Hills secure INTEGRITY operating system and GHNet
IPv4/v6 router stack, providing end customers with a complete, functional
single-vendor solution.
For pre-integrated reference platform or commercial platform support
or operating system support other than
INTEGRITY, please contact Green Hills (gatedinfo@ghs.com).
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