TNSR & Baremetal Build Recommendations.
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I am looking to move away from Cisco and trying to avoid Juniper, Mikrotik, etc. for Edge/BGP Peering platforms. I came across TNSR and was curious if someone on the Netgate team could help me understand clearly the hardware specs to reach 50 Gbps+ and beyond. How to achieve redundancy and scale along with support agreement options.
I am looking for a solution like TNSR to deploy at data centers either as bare metal or VMware ESXi in Salt Lake and Seattle to handle peering for my ISP and Datacenter solutions. At these two locations we take connections from at least 3 upstream peers and then make connections to the regional internet exchanges. We then feed this back to our regional Points of Presence using wavelength circuits from independent providers with one connection coming from each datacenter location.
At my disposal I have access to a number of Dell R6225 and R7225 servers with Dual AMD 7702 Epyc Processors (64 Cores per Socket) and 1.5 TB of RAM. They have multiple SSD drives and RAID cards. I also have access to a range of NIC that appear to be supported by the DPKP recommendation. I was thinking either a 100 Gbps Mellanox ConnectX-5 CX516A or an Intel E810.
The servers I have are AMD. How will this impact performance? Would I be better off with Intel? If so please tell me which processor/specs. If I stick with AMD do I need to add a NETGATE CPIC-8955 CRYPTOGRAPHIC ACCELERATOR CARD WITH QAT?
I also have access to a number of SuperMicro SuperServer 1019D-16C-RAN13TP+ with Intel Xeon D-2183IT Processor, 16-Core, 32 Threads, 2.2 GHz, 100W512 GB of RAM multiple drives SSD/NVME.
What else am I missing? If anyone from Netgate is listening I would love a consultation and to figure out a license for a PoC as well as quotes for multiple licenses.
I am grateful for the assistance and very hopeful this might be my longterm solution. Thanks in advance!
-Jake
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As a follow on to my first post. I am very interested in what would be considered an ideal build for 50 Gbps, 100-400 Gbps.
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Hi Jake,
A list of components that are tested for compatibility with TNSR specifically can be found here. You'll find compatible processors and NICs in that document.
While AMD Epyc may install and run, we do not test these processors, so it is recommended to stick to Intel so that we can guarantee compatibility with TNSR, not just DPDK and VPP.
The hardware requirements to achieve your throughput requirements will likely depend on the finer details of your use-case. Since you mention a CPIC card, I am assuming there is some IPSec requirement here in addition to the BGP peering you mention in the post. Please feel free to reach out to me at sales@netgate.com and we can set up a call to discuss your requirements in more detail. We'd be happy to assist with an evaluation and help you achieve your goals with TNSR.
Thanks,
Max