DC-ISIS is a portable source code implementation of the Intermediate System-Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocol designed explicitly to support the scalability, availability and functional requirements of OEMs building devices for next generation networks.
DC-ISIS shares Metaswitch's unicast IP routing architecture. It is available for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
DC-ISIS has comprehensive support for the relevant standards, with management interfaces and a design suited for the most demanding applications.
The DC-ISIS architecture splits the product into modular components. This allows these components to be distributed onto line cards and supports multiple instances as required for virtual routers and VPNs.
DC-ISIS Features
IS-IS Protocol Function
The DC-ISIS software product includes the following IS-IS protocol function.
- Full integrated IS-IS protocol support
- ISO 10589
- RFC 1195
- RFC 3719
- RFC 3787
- RFC 5308
- Multi-protocol support, including IPv4 and IPv6
- Optional protocol features
- Equal cost multipath
- Dynamic Hostname Exchange (RFC 2763)
- Domain-wide prefix distribution (RFC 2966)
- Three-way handshake (RFC 3373)
- IS-IS Cryptographic Authentication (RFC 3567)
- Restart Signaling (RFC 3847)
- IS-IS Mesh Groups (RFC 2973)
- Point-to-point over LAN (RFC 5309)
- VPNs
- Support for Virtual Routers using multi-instance DC-Routing Table Manager
- Support for Virtual Routing Forwarding tables using multi-instance DC-Routing Table Manager
- Integration with DC-BGP, DC-OSPF, DC-RIP or third party implementations
- Traffic Engineering support
- Calculation of Constrained Shortest Path First routes
- Caching of CSPF routes
- IS-IS Extensions for Traffic Engineering (RFC 3784)
- IPv6 Traffic Engineering in IS-IS (RFC 6119
- Optical support
- Routing for separate data and signaling networks
- Integrated with DC-MPLS and DC-LMP
- IS-IS Extensions in support of GMPLS (RFC 4205)
Management and Integration
- Pre-integrated and transactional CLI, NETCONF, WEB UI, SNMP, REST, and scripted management solutions available through pre-integration and partnership with Tail-f ConfD
- High-level Yang models map directly to operator-familiar semantics
- Easily integrated with proprietary management solutions via alternative low-level MIB interfaces
- Support for all BGP v4 MIB tables defined in RFC 1657
- Extensions based on the latest BGP v4 MIB draft (draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-mibv2)
- Proprietary extensions to allow MIB-based configuration of BGP routing policies
- High availability and fault tolerance in management of configuration information (when used with Configuration Safe Store)
Carrier Class Design
- Performance and scalability
- No hard scalability limits in the code
- Support for more than 256 circuits
- Algorithms designed for millions of routes
- Route caching for CSPF queries
- Distribution
- Multi-instance Routing Table Manager, CSPF calculator and subnetwork dependent components can all be distributed onto line cards
- Use of DCL N-BASE environment allows distribution of components without changes to protocol code
- Reduces load on the central processor
- Reduces traffic on the backplane
- Prevents expensive SPF calculations from holding up time-critical Hello processing
- Prioritizes Hello PDUs over other PDUs
- Redundancy and high availability
- Integrated with DCL's high availability framework (HAF)
- Uninterrupted packet forwarding across hardware or software failure
- Uninterrupted CSPF calculations across hardware or software failure
- Adjacencies maintained across protocol manager failure
- Availability and fault tolerance in management of configuration information possible with Configuration Safe Store