Peering Router Software

Over recent years, ‘cloud-native’ service providers have developed ways to build and run massive data centers with a high degree of automation, to reduce operational overheads and deliver levels of service agility beyond traditional carrier infrastructure. RtBrick’s open disaggregated Peering Router brings these same benefits to ISP networks, by using agile methodologies and the same battle-hardened DevOps cloud automation tools that have been adopted by the world’s biggest cloud providers.

The RtBrick Peering Router is delivered as a software container, packaged out-of-the-box with the Open Network Linux (ONL) provided by the hardware SKU manufacturers, which handles peripherals such as LEDs, temperature sensors, and so on. The RtBrick Peering Router software runs on a choice of low-cost but powerful bare-metal switches.

Benefits

RtBrick’s disaggregated Peering Router delivers some significant benefits compared to traditional monolithic systems:

• · Greater agility – you can add new services in weeks rather than years

1. · Reduced risk – no more vendor lock-in and a simpler automated operating environment

• · Cloud cost-levels – leverage low-cost merchant silicon and automate your operations like a ‘cloud-native’

Agility

ZTP (Zero-Touch-Provisioning) ensures that each switch is booted, provisioned and operational without requiring manual intervention. This means that you can add capacity, or roll-out new service features, in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks. The software itself is developed using Agile methodologies so that features are rapidly prototyped and implemented, reducing the time-to-market for new services.

Reduced risk

RtBrick’s Peering Router software is compiled for your specific use-case, using only the features you need. With an order of magnitude fewer lines of code, and a single state database rather than hundreds, the whole system is less complex, less prone to bugs and has much faster restart times. It also allows you to pick and mix between the latest silicon and the best available software. It also includes a number of critical security features detailed below.

Cloud cost-levels

Now you can take advantage of the low cost-points of merchant silicon on your choice of bare-metal switches, significantly reducing your capex bill. And opex costs can be reduced by automating your operations, using ZTP and the same Web2.0 operational tools that the ‘cloud-natives’ use to run their infrastructure.

Deployment Options

The Peering router's capacity can be scaled down to a single RU bare-metal switch or a more powerful 2RU switch with interfaces up to 400Gbps.

Single RU bare metal switch example

Management and Operations

Along with a traditional CLI, RtBrick’s Management API has been designed to simplify the integration with your existing OSS and BSS systems. It reduces the amount of time and effort required to make your disaggregated network operational, and it leverages widely-adopted industry tools and programming languages. RtBrick’s API is ‘consumer-driven’ – which means you can use the formats and languages of your choice, rather than have them imposed on you by a vendor. This allows you to build a client in Python, Go or Java, for example, as you prefer. And the APIs are all edited in Swagger, which is also a widely understood tool used by developers. RtBrick’s Management API actually comprises of several underlying APIs, which each follow the same consumer-driven approach.

Security

• BGP Flowspec is a powerful tool used to help protect networks from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

• Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a mechanism that allows network owners to validate and secure the critical route updates, or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements, and prevent route hijacking or misconfiguration.
• TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO) enhances the security and authenticity of TCP segments exchanged during BGP and LDP sessions. It adds support for the most current security mechanisms, and is stronger than legacy mechanisms such as TCP MD5.
• sFlow, or "sampled flow", samples packets from routers and sends them to a central collector for analysis, to identify abnormal traffic patterns and potential attacks.
• Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM) prevents a remote intruder from hijacking a route using a mechanism that also protects it from CPU-utilization based attacks.

Features

The features supported by RtBrick FullStack are expanding all the time, because it's much faster for us to add and test new features than it is using a traditional monolithic code base. You can see our current feature list on our latest data sheet.

Compatible Hardware

RtBrick's Full Stack routing software can operate on many bare metal switches, depending on your performance and port count requirements. You can find details of compatible hardware here.