With NSR on the SR-series router devices, routing neighbors are unaware of a routing process fault. If a fault occurs, a reliable and deterministic activity switch to the inactive control complex occurs such that routing topology and reachability are not affected, even in the presence of routing updates. NSR achieves high availability through parallelization by maintaining up to date routing state information, at all times, on the standby route processor. This capability is achieved independently of protocols or protocol extensions, providing a more robust solution than graceful restart protocols between network routers.
The NSR implementation on the SR-series routers supports all routing protocols. NSR makes it possible to keep the existing sessions (BGP, LDP, OSPF, and so on) during a CPM switchover, including support for MPLS signaling protocols. Peers do not see any change.
Protocol extensions are not required. There are no interoperability issues and there is no need to define protocol extensions for every protocol. Unlike nonstop forwarding and graceful restart, the forwarding information in NSR is always up to date, which eliminates possible blackholes or forwarding loops.
Traditionally, addressing high availability issues have been patched through non-stop forwarding solutions. With the implementation of NSR, these limitations are overcome by delivering an intelligent hitless failover solution. This enables a carrier-class foundation for transparent networks, required to support business IP services backed by stringent SLAs. This level of high availability poses a major issue for conventional routers whose architectural design limits or prevents them from implementing NSR.