Overview

Applications

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.

Key Features

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

Key Benefits

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.

Supported Architectures

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).

Additional Green Hills Software GateD Products

Other Secure Networking Products

• INTEGRITY Operating System
• INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization Technology
• GHNet IPv4/v6 host and routing stack
• SSH, SSL/TLS, IPSec/IKE, crypto algorithms
• Telnet, RADIUS, SNTP, DNS, DHCP
• Wireless Supplicant with security and CCX