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Vendors of BGP-capable hard- and software

• As Zebra progress has been glacial, a group of people created a fork under the name Quagga. Quagga is more community-based and a somewhat better choice than Zebra in an operational environment.

• OpenBSD, the security conscious sibling in the BSD operating system family, has its own BGP daemon implementation: OpenBGPD.

• The Faculty of Math and Physics of the Charles University in Prague has created BGP capable routing software for Unix machines released under the GNU General Public License. The BIRD Internet Routing Daemon supports multiple tables with BGP and RIP for both IPv4 and IPv6 and OSPF for IPv4.

• XORP is an extensible open source routing platform that has a configuration language very similar to Juniper's.

• IP Infusion offers the ZebOS Advanced Routing Suite, which is a commercial off-shoot of GNU Zebra. It has many enhancements, including MPLS VPNs using BGP and it runs on Linux, Solaris, any BSD and several other operating systems.

• Cisco Systems has an extensive line of routers that run Cisco's IOS software. The 2500 and higher models support BGP, although the 2500 series itself is not powerfull enough to handle anything near the full routing table. There are now also several multilayer switches such as the 6500 that can route IP and run BGP.

• Juniper Networks has a number of routers built around a special packet forwarding ASIC: M5, M10, M20, M40 and M160. Newer additions to the family are the M7i (the "Cisco 7200 killer"), M10i and the M320.

• Brocade (formerly Foundry Networks) has multilayer switches/routers that run BGP.

• Extreme Networks builds Ethernet switches with BGP capability.

• Metaswitch Networks has a full range of routing products, including the BGP, OSPF and IS-IS protocols. BGP has support for VPNs. The software is very portable and should run on pretty much anything, from Solaris to Windows to special environments, with very little porting effort.

• Alcatel-Lucent has some BGP-capable routers/switches.

• The maker called my attention to FreeRouter. Not entirely sure what it does, but it looks interesting.

• Noction offers an Intelligent Routing Platform that iteracts with regular BGP routers in order to dynamically influence BGP's path selection to achieve better performance.

• GNU Zebra is free routing software distributed under the GNU Public License, developed by Kunihiro Ishiguro, that runs on Linux and many BSD platforms. Zebra fully supports IPv6. The user interface is very Cisco-like. "Zebra has been decommissioned."

• Enterasys Networks also builds multilayer (up to layer 4) switches that support BGP.

• Wind River has a RouterWare product line with protocol stacks for embedded systems. One of their products is a BGP stack.

• Riverstone Networks has a series of Metro Routers.

• The GateD routing software is available as a commercial product from NextHop Technologies. There used to be a free version as well. Maybe it's still around somewhere.

• The Multi-Threaded Routing Toolkit (MRT or MRTD) routing software by the University of Michigan and Merit Network runs on many systems (including Windows2000/NT, it seems). Development status is unclear.

• Charlotte's Networks has a huge "Terabit Router", the Aranea-1.

• Nortel Networks uses a distributed system design in their Backbone Node Concentrator routers.

• Future Communications Software also makes protocol stacks for embedded systems, including the FutureBGP BGP implementation.