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.

• Data Connection 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.

• 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.

• 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. Current versions are pre-releases for the first official release.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Foundry Networks' BigIron and NetIron and possibly FastIron switches handle BGP. Apart from the Ethernet family, these switches also do Packet over SONET and ATM.

• Extreme Networks also builds Ethernet switches with BGP capability and support for SONET and ATM: the Summit i, BlackDiamond and Alpine models.

• Riverstone Networks has a series of Metro Routers.

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

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

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

• Alcatel's 7420 ESR seems to have some telco heritage, but it is an IP router.

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

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