Need Advice on BGP Equipment / Configuration
Now that my warning label is out of the way, I need some input on how people are setting up relatively small BGP networks in terms of equipment used and configuration. The network is currently pushing about 60-80mbit over Fast-E to a single provider, and we would like to add an additional provider for redundancy and hopefully increased performance, as well as a host of other reasons. We are trying to keep costs as low as possible, so I'm looking for equipment recommendations to set up a relatively small BGP network that is capable of pushing 300-400mbit (about 3-4 times current size). To start with, the ability to BGP a couple of Fast Ethernet interfaces would be required, and if the ability to upgrade to a couple of Gig ports was available, it would be an obvious plus. We don't have large DoS problems etc, currently.
A few pieces of equipment we have looked at:
Riverstone RS-3000 / RS-8000
Cisco 7204VXR / 7206VXR
Foundry BigIron 4000/8000
All of these devices will reportedly handle BGP, and obviously all have their pros/cons. I'm looking for additional input or information on these devices, or feel free to recommend something different, if you can back up your recommendation.
As I said above, I fully intend to hire an expert to help implement our plan. I'm not a complete moron when it comes to this stuff, I just want to learn a bit about the equpment I've seen many people using or talking about, learn some pros/cons to different implementations, and most importantly just to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation with the engineer that we get to help us out.
