On Thursday, March 24, 2011 02:49:59 PM cjwstudios wrote: > Hello Juniper folks :)
Sorry for the rather late chime-in on this one: > Since everything is cost sensitive these days I initially > planned on implementing an ebayish 7206vxr-npe-g1. > Although I was quite happily slinging the 7206 around 10 > years ago I realized tonight that it has been 10 years > and the 7206 platform is well aged. Well, it depends on how you look at this. The 7206-VXR chassis is really quite old, yes. However, the NPE's are what keep the box going. While the NPE-G1 is quite good, in many cases, it will top-out somewhere between 300Mbps - 500Mbps, depending on what you're doing. The NPE-G2 should be able to touch 900Mbps with ease (I've done 950Mbps on it - MPLS, RSVP, LDP, IS-IS, BGP, basic QoS, IPv6). Both the NPE-G1 and NPE-G2 are fairly modern if you consider the fact that they are CPU-based forwarding boards. Also, Cisco's IOS 12.2(33)SR* code base (now in its SRE iteration) is very advanced. It's what keeps the box modern. Even with all our M, T, MX, CRS, ASR1000 and ASR9000 platforms in the stable, the NPE-G1's/G2's are still very handy, more so when nearly all connections are Ethernet in nature. The biggest problem with the 7206-VXR chassis is the bandwidth points limitation, where certain PA's (port adapters) will consume a certain amount of backplane bandwidth, determining the limitation on how many PA's you can scale to. If you looking at things like STM-1/OC-3, Fast-E and Gig-E PA's, this can get hectic, but if you're working on E1 PA's and things of the sort, there is nothing to worry about. Slower interfaces don't generally tax as much, if at all. If you're only concerned about Ethernet, then the NPE-G1/G2 won't penalize you if you only use the ports on the NPE itself. Of course, you quickly run into a density issue if you need more than 3 ports. The 7201 will solve that as it has 4 ports, but this may yet be still not enough. For us, one of the biggest reasons we still maintain dozens of 7206-VXR's with NPE-G1's/G2's is for situations where we need to handle less than 1Gbps, but need a whole lot of features which can come with restrictions in hardware-based platforms, e.g., QoS, e.t.c. There are really are tons of features in this platform's code that would put any hardware box to shame - provided you can keep utilization below 1Gbps for the NPE-G2. In low bandwidth peering sites, we'll happily place an NPE-G1/G2 on the boat to go solve that problem :-). Will Cisco release an NPE-G3 and keep the platform relevant. I don't know. I doubt, now that the ASR1000 is expanding in cousins. But as long as the SR* code continues to be developed for the 7200, the box will remain alive for the simple reason that most folks that need to handle more than 1Gbps will not consider a 7200 anyway - but below that, it is still a very viable option. > I suppose my questions are whether a base M7i config out > of the box will support this application or if there are > better options out there. Thank you in advance. The problem with the M7i is that it's now old. For the amount of money the box costs, one doesn't feel they should be restricted in the way the box does. If it were cheaper (along with its components), I wouldn't complain as much. Heck, I wouldn't complain at all. That said, if you need hardware-based 6-in-4 tunneling without worrying about buying an MS-PIC or Tunnel PIC, the M7i is a great box for that. Then again, an NPE-G1/G2 will do that for you quite easily, but in the CPU path (not quite a bad thing unless you really need to handle more capacity). Moving forward, though, if you need to handle all Ethernet, I'd say consider the ASR1001/2/4/6 on the Cisco side, or the MX80 on the Juniper side. If you need to handle some Ethernet and some TDM/SDH/SONET, I'd say consider the ASR1001/2/4/6 on the Cisco side, or the M120 on the Juniper side. Sadly, there is nothing in the Juniper portfolio that can compete with the Cisco's ASR1000 line as of today. Waiting for that book to be written :-). Meanwhile, we continue to buy more ASR1000's for that role. Cheers, Mark.
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