Hello Clement, even the most entry level server these days will meet your requirements. Bird is very lean, a system with 2 cores and 4 gbps of ram is plenty for what you described. 

The only thing I would suggest is you look at Intel NIC’s like the i340 or i350 which will help a great deal if you approach anywhere near 1 gbps or a high number of small packets. 

Cheers,
Mike

--
Michael McConnell
WINK Streaming;
email: michael@winkstreaming.com
phone: +1 312 281-5433 x 7400
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On Mar 7, 2017, at 7:57 AM, Clément Guivy <clement@guivy.fr> wrote:

Hello, I am considering the setup of BIRD as a router to handle our internet traffic. One information I fail to find is hardware requirements. My use case is as follows :
-          Two transit providers, each sending a full internet view
-          Two peerings on an IXP (less than 100k routes each)
-          One iBGP session between the two BIRD routers
-          One eBGP session to our internal network (advertising a default route and receiving less than 500 internal routes)
-          Traffic would be less than 1Gbps but as I understand it, this is relevant to forwarding plane and therefore out of the scope of BIRD.
 
Which kind of hardware would be fit for that ? especially regarding CPU and RAM. I was considering an entry-level server with low-end Xeon CPU (E5-2603, 1.7Ghz 6 cores) and 8GB RAM, does that look sufficient, insufficient, or overkill ? I can’t really tell. By the way, is BIRD able to use multiple cores ? and are there hardware requirements to be careful of, disregard CPU and RAM ?
 
Thanks.
 
Regards,
 
Clément Guivy