How to select your core routers?

January 4th, 2010 Wael Osama Posted in Network Design, Platforms 1 Comment »

This question comes to my mind every time we are faced by choosing a new device for our network or whenever I read about hardware architecture of networking devices. However, when the time comes for  choosing routers for a large network migration I thought it will be wise to have a checklist or a model [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

CRS-1 Hardware Overview

December 23rd, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in Network Design, Platforms 1 Comment »

After introducing the Cisco  CRS-1 router in a previous post, We are going to delve more into the hardware architecture of this router. I believe we have to start by defining the main hardware components of the CRS-1 router and briefly describe their functions. In later posts we are going to study each part in [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Carrier Routing System (CRS-1) Overview

December 10th, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in Network Design, Platforms 1 Comment »

We have finished the physical installation of our CRS-1 routers this week, so I thought it would be nice to have some discussions about CRS-1, Juniper T-series and some general high end platform concepts. I believe this will be a series of posts, we can start with the CRS-1 overview.
The CRS-1 is a carrier class [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

BGP table analysis and statistics

December 9th, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in BGP, Network Design No Comments »

For those of you who are interested in obtaining some useful information about the BGP table (Internet routing table), check out the following websites for some useful reports, analysis and statistics. Nice resources for daily work, research and planning.
Play around:
BGP Routing Table Analysis Reports.
Check bgp4.as also for  a ton of tools and information about the [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Cisco or Juniper, Which one should I choose?

December 3rd, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in Network Design, Off Topic 6 Comments »

Being in charge of choosing the right boxes for a service provider network is definitely a hard task specially if it is a large network migration and this is exactly what we were doing in the past few months. The challenge here is that your are faced with a lot of choices that will affect [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

IS-IS and fast convergence ongoing tricks

March 22nd, 2009 mmahmoud Posted in Bury the hatchet, ISIS, MPLS, Network Design 6 Comments »

Been a while since my last post, I was extremely busy doing a lot of things, anyway I am glade to be back.
This post I am going to cover a nice tool for enhancing IS-IS convergence, I am really amazed by the ideas that the guys out there pop up. Inventing such wonderful tools requires [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Link state protocols and Areas concept

February 23rd, 2009 Wael Osama Posted in ISIS, Network Design, OSPF 8 Comments »

Link state protocols have introduced the concept of multiple routing areas withing the same routing domain. Link state protocols depend on the fact that all routers must have an identical link state database and then each router will start calculating its very own routing table from this information.
However, this rule sometimes introduce scalability limitations to [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Fast Convergence: IS-IS performance tuning

December 5th, 2008 Wael Osama Posted in ISIS, Network Design 1 Comment »

IS-IS is the most selected protocol by service providers and large carriers all over the world; this is what makes the understanding  of this protocol important. We have been discussing fast convergence and high availability in the latest few posts and this post is not different, I am just going to give you an overview [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

BGP performance tuning – Convergence, Stability, Scalability and NSF (Part 1)

December 5th, 2008 mmahmoud Posted in BGP, Bury the hatchet, Network Design, Routing No Comments »

It is a very critical matter for a network architect (the same goes for a network operator but with a different prospective) to understand the inside out of tuning the routing protocols performance, in order to be able to conduct an appealing and effective low level design for small to large scale networks.
We have been [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Fast Convergence: Partial SPF calculation

December 3rd, 2008 Wael Osama Posted in IGP, Network Design 1 Comment »

Shortest path first (SPF) is the algorithm used by IS-IS and OSPF routing protocols to calculate the topological information from the received link state updates. You can find more information about SPF calculation follow the link Dijkstra’s algorithm.
Partial SPF is an efficient shortcut used by the routers to speed up the process of route calculations [...]

AddThis Social Bookmark Button