On 7/2/23 10:42, Saku Ytti wrote:
Yes. Satellite is basically VLAN aggregation, but a little bit less broken. Both are much inferior to MPLS.
I agree that using vendor satellites solves this problem. The issue, IIRC, is was what happens when you need to have the satellites in rings?
Satellites work well when fibre is not an issue, and each satellite can hang off the PE router like a spur. But if you need to build rings in order to cover as many areas as possible at a reasonable cost, satellites seemed to struggled to have scalable ring topologies. This could have changed over time, not sure. I stopped tracking satellite technologies around 2010.
But usually that's not the comparison due to real or perceived cost reasons. So in absence of a vendor selling you the front-plate you need, option space often considered is satellite or vlan aggregation, instead of connecting some smaller MPLS edge boxes to bigger aggregation MPLS boxes, which would be, in my opinion, obviously better.
The cost you pay for a small Metro-E router optimized for ring deployments is more than paid back in the operational simplicity that comes with MPLS-based rings. Having ran such architectures for close to 15 years now (since the Cisco ME3600X/3800X), I can tell you how much easier it has been for us to scale and keep customers because we did not have to run Layer 2 rings like our competitors did.
But as discussed, centralised chassis boxes are appearing as a new option to the option space.
Well, for data centre aggregation, especially for 100Gbps transit ports to customers, centralized routers make sense (MX304, MX10003, ASR9903, e.t.c.). But those boxes don't make sense as Metro-E routers... they can aggregate Metro-E routers, but can't be Metro-E routers due to their cost.
I think there is still a use-case for distributed boxes like the MX480 and MX960, for cases where you have to aggregate plenty of 1Gbps and 10Gbps customers. Those line cards, especially the ones that are now EoS/EoL, are extremely cheap and more than capable of supporting 1Gbps and 10Gbps services in the data centre. At the moment, with modern centralized routers optimized for 100Gbps and 400Gbps, using them to aggregate 10Gbps services or lower maybe be costlier than, say, an MX480 or MX960 with MPC2E or MPC7E line cards attached to a dense Ethernet switch via 802.1Q.
For the moment, the Metro-E router that makes the most sense to us is the ACX7024. Despite its Broadcom base, we seem to have found a way to make it work for us, and replace the ASR920.
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