Low voltage server/appliance for bird.

[mirsal]

On Wednesday, November 13th, 2024 at 5:56 PM, Pim van Pelt via Bird-users <bird-users at network.cz> wrote:
> > On Wednesday, November 13th, 2024 at 10:55 AM, Mike Neo <neomikemac at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > I am looking for a 1U rack platform with 1x or 2x psu with low power consumption for a bird-based bgp router (Ubuntu). The supported traffic is expected to be ~1-2Gbps. Can anyone recommend a tested solution?
> 
> If you're willing to run VPP on Ubuntu (or Debian) can be done on very low power machines and at surprising throughput.
> Take a look at for example this ~18 Watt machine: https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/07/05/review-r86s-jasper-lake-n6005/
> Or a rack mountable ~22 Watt machine: https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/08/03/review-gowin-1u-2x25g-alder-lake-n305/
> 
> Both of these machines are very affordable, rack mountable (in the case of R86S with a rack-mount kit), and route 10G+ with full BGP tables.
> The articles also go into some detail on the machine and CPU specs, and how those intersect with DPDK and VPP forwarding.

Yes, DPDK+VPP is a great way to achieve impressive throughput on very low power hardware, some of which could even be considered e-waste by today's standards. It behaves in about the same way as an accelerated data-plane, so it adds some complexity compared to using operating-system-provided network stacks, but in my humble opinion it is very much worth it, especially with tools like linux-cp which make deploying VPP along with bird pretty much seamless.

cheers!

-- 
mirsal