On Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 10:56:23PM +0000, Adam Vitkovsky wrote:
> >
> One thing I'm not clear about MX104 and MX80 is, are there two TRIO chips or 
> just one?

There is only 1 NPU on both platforms.

My problem with MX104 is the same 'practical-use-case' scenario and port 
economics you described.


While MX104 provides simpler design and less things to potentially fail, when I 
need to deploy a peering router with acceptable 10G port density, ASR 9k tends 
to be more cost-effective and useful IMO; and then, there is that slow BGP 
performance issue on MX104, which does not exist on ASR9001.

Saku did raise one important point though a few weeks earlier in c-nsp 
regarding ASR 9001 -- it is 32-bit; and with IOS-XR moving to 64-bit 
architecture, the future of 9001 as a platform is questionable when making new 
purchasing decisions.  It certainly is something to think about.

But let's talk price here, specifically port costs.

To achieve 8x 10GE on MX104, you need built-in 4x10GE unlock port license, and 
then you need two MIC-3D-2XGE-XFP, which by themselves are priced like licenses 
(router ports aren't cheap).  By the time you're done pricing out an MX104 
loaded up to 8x 10GE interfaces with just single RE (but two PSUs), you might 
as well pick up an ASR 9006 with a single MOD80 card to match the configuration 
as closely as possible to a loaded MX104.  This is what we ended up doing to 
replace an aging MX80 router doing peering.  Plus, on 9006, you get a real 
control-plane that is directly comparable to that of MX240/480 (RSP440 or 880) 
that has no problems doing heavy BGP work.

Given that MX104 only has half the NPU of what 9001 offers, plus lower 
bandwidth, plus craptastic convergence speed, I would expect the price to be 
competitively lower, not exactly same or slightly higher than that of 
comparable ASR9k box, which in practice functions just fine doing heavy BGP.  
We don't need GRE tunnels on our peering routers, we just need MPLS 1-label 
imposition/disposition, IGP, fast BGP convergence, and acceptable 10GE port 
costs--that it.. it's not too much to ask for.  For us at least, ASR9K meets 
that; MX104 does not.

James
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