RouterFarm

Abstract

Planned maintenance is a fact of life in IP networks. Examples of maintenance activities include updating router software as well as processor upgrades, memory upgrades, installation of additional line cards, and other hardware upgrades. While planned maintenance is clearly necessary, it is also costly. Software upgrades, for example, require rebooting the router. Due to the time required to reboot the router, and then synchronize state (such as BGP routing information) with network neighbors, the upgrade process can yield outages of 10--15 minutes.