Excellent.  Dou you have a precise model or hardware reference for those Supermicro machines so that we can have them sourced locally.

I’ll buy you beers when I see you.

Regards

From: Pim van Pelt via zanog-discuss <zanog-discuss@lists.nog.net.za>
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2024 4:31 PM
To: zanog-discuss@lists.nog.net.za
Cc: Pim van Pelt <pim@ipng.ch>
Subject: [zanog-discuss] Re: Linux/VPP router

Hoi folks,

On 26.03.2024 12:30, Ron B via zanog-discuss wrote:

I'm certain many on here would be interested in the same hardware as used by
PIM that can which can be used for bird and frr.
 
I haven't been too worried as my imports have been fine and there has been
no supply crisis.

Granted i don't know much about the reseller and distributor market in South Africa, but in case it helps:
- IPng uses these Supermicro machines, as I really do like the IPMI and power-to-performance (38W all up for a router that can do 60Gbps and 35Mpps).
- IPng also uses regular Dell R620/R630 from the refurb market and ~any reasonable Xeon E5 would do, as would Zen3+ CPUs (like Epyc, Romes and Milans).

For vendors, pretty much anything that runs Debian will do: HPE, Dell, Supermicro, whitelabel boxes, and so on. As long as the network card is DPDK enabled (most Intel 1G/2.5G/10G+, Mellanox Cx4+), you should be totally fine.

A modern E5 Xeon will yield between 8Mpps-15Mpps per CPU thread, and it's relatively straight forward to get a machine with 40 cores or even 80 cores. So realistically, the main bottleneck will be PCI bus and network card throughput. "Any modern PC will do" and "Vendor does not matter". I'd love to learn more about the local market, what you can and cannot buy.

groet,
Pim

-- 
Pim van Pelt <pim@ipng.ch>
PBVP1-RIPE https://ipng.ch/