[rdl]

"there aren't really any viable options" to juniper or cisco for core/edge routers.

There are some routing protocols which interoperate (which is how different sites on the Internet can talk to each other), but most of the protocols used for HA or management of a given set of routers, or, more importantly, most tested/debugged implementations of HA and device management, are Cisco or Juniper specific.

No big deal announcing routes to your upstream if you use Juniper and they use Cisco. Big deal if you have Cisco+Juniper and want to do HSRP (Cisco-only).

[windexh8er]

Well, no.

I've been in network engineering for 12+ years and I fundamentally disagree with a lot of what is said about "networking" and interop by many programmer-types (not casting here, but) on HN. Yes, yes, you may understand system DevOps to a point, however I'm not sure you've spent a significant amount of time studying Dijkstra's algorithm or truly have an idea of how to deploy a global IPv6 overlay. I'm also not trying to be snide here but I feel that, often times, many things that come up on HN are just fundamentally designed wrong from PHY all the way up until the devs get a hold of the rest. I've been in a very successful startup (think one of the top online backup services) wherein their network was run on commodity junk hardware. They were asking me how I'd troubleshoot this, that and the other thing - obviously with no debug (this guy said that with a grin). First and foremost, you designed it wrong - I can show you inefficiency in about 10 minutes of performance engineering that I would have designed around without thinking about those things. So, yes, I can waste time tracking down a bad NIC on your network, but if you feel that you've earned geek cred because you fired up Wireshark and parsed through a few simplistic ARP tables - you haven't impressed anyone but yourself. That's when I realized I was working with professional developers, and not network architects.

Your simplistic view of FHRP is trivial at best. Maybe if you were talking about how you'd design fault tolerance into a virtual link, say an LSP, with something like BFD in your design I'd be more impressed than conversations about proprietary redundancy protocols of which most network engineers won't touch for a variety of other reasons than the big "C".

</endrant>

[rdl]

Virtually no network engineers (by percentage) have to do anything other than worry about what their vendor supports for a given configuration (and usually a fairly small set of configurations, too); it's much more about policy and operations.

Similarly very few developers have to solve open CS problems in writing a CRUD application (or I guess more comparably to ops, come up with a novel implementation of a complex algorithm).

This is progress, though.

[windexh8er]

"Virtually no network engineers (by percentage) have to do anything other than worry about what their vendor supports for a given configuration" - this statement puts a perspective on your thinking. And then I read your information on the services your company offers, and I realize that it's not worth having a discussion.

"<redacted> takes your security very seriously." - right. That's a statement, not information regarding the thought or implementation. There's not even a mention of technology. <sigh>

[JoachimSchipper]

Be nice.

[justincormack]

Thats why software defined networking, Openflow etc, are going to take off, as you can get back control of the protocols and what is going on, and avoid the vendor lockin.

[sneak]

> Thats why software defined networking, Openflow etc, are going to take off

I've been hearing this for a decade. It's still not true. I'm not sure why, either.

[rdl]

What do you call Arista? Also there is a lot of interesting "virtual appliance" networking going on.

I agree the right choice today is almost certainly a C or J router and probably C or A switches, but e.g. hardware load balancers like F5 seem to be losing out to software in most deployments (increasingly).

I built a decent sized network with Zebra 15y ago, which was pretty obviously the wrong tech, but interesting.

[FlukeATX]

Cisco + Juniper environment and you want gateway redundancy?

Hello, VRRP!

There are open standards for pretty much every Cisco proprietary protocol. Even EIGRP is now available as an informational RFC.

[pyvpx]

you can't utilize OSPF, ISIS, BGP, et. al. for high availability? You do realize HSRP is merely for a redundant gateway address, right?

most service provider networks manage via the CLI (generally scripted, for better or worse) and occasionally a vendor-specific API.

while I will agree juniper and cisco are generally the best choice for core/edge routers, there are other 'viable' options depending on your requirements. if you need in excess of 2500 BGP sessions on a single chassis, there aren't many viable options besides a Cisco 7600.

I certainly do not mean to be rude, but I feel you're attempting to speak from experience you don't fully have (yet, hopefully!)

[windexh8er]

Wow, just... Wow. So. Far. Off. Base. (see my post above)