7600's/ASR 1k Have you looked in to Ciso ME 3600X/ME 3800X series?
Without a bias these are the top notch products in the market for Metro E. -Raman On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Jason Lixfeld <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2010-10-20, at 11:24 AM, Eric Merkel wrote: > >> Any suggestions, success or horror stories are appreciated. ;) > > I've been going through pretty much the same exercise looking for a decent PE > for almost two years. Our requirements were for a PE device that had between > 12-24 ports (in a perfect world, mixed mode 10/100/1000 copper + SFP), 10G > uplinks, EoMPLS, MPLS VPN, DHCP server, port-protect/UNI (or similar) > capabilities, DC power and a small footprint (1RU) > > Of all the ones we looked at (Juniper, Cisco, Extreme, Brocade, MRV, Alcatel) > initially, MRV was the only contender. The rest either didn't have a > product, or their offering didn't meet various points within our criteria. > > As such, we bought a bunch of MRVs in early 2009 and after four months of > trial and error, we yanked every single one out of the network. From a > physical perspective, the box was perfect. Port density was perfect, > mixed-mode ports, promised a 10G uplink product soon, size was perfect, power > was perfect, we thought we had it nailed. Unfortunately there are no words > to describe how terrible the software was. The CLI took a little getting > used to, which is pretty much par for the course when you're dealing with a > new vendor, but the code itself was just absolutely broken, everywhere. > Duplex issues, LDP constantly crashing taking the box with it, OSPF issues, > the list went on and on. To their credit, they flew engineers up from the US > and they were quite committed to making stuff work, but at the end of the > day, they just couldn't make it go. We pulled the plug in May 2009 and I > haven't heard a thing about their product since then, so maybe they've got it > all together. > > While meeting with Juniper a few months later about a different project, they > said they had a product that might fit our needs. The EX4200. As such, we > had a few of these loaned to our lab for a few months to put through their > paces, from a features and interoperability perspective. They work[1] and > they seem to work well. The show stopper was provisioning[1] and size. The > box is massive, albeit it is still 1U. > > [1] (I'm not a Juniper guy, so my recollection on specific terms and jargon > may be a bit off kilter) they only support ccc, which makes provisioning an > absolute nightmare. From my experience with Cisco and MRV, you only have to > configure the EoMPLS vc. On the EX4200, you have to create the LSPs as well. > To get a ccc working, the JunOS code block was far larger and much more > involved per vc than the single line Cisco equivalent. To create the LSPs > was, I believe, two more equally large sized code blocks. At the end of the > day, it was just too involved. We needed something simpler. > > About the same time that we started to evaluate the EX4200, Cisco had pitched > us on their (then alpha) Whales platform. It looked promising (MRV still had > the best form factor) and we expressed our interest in getting a beta unit in > as soon as we were able to. This is now known as the ME3600 and ME3800 > platform and we've been testing a beta unit in our lab for the past few > months. This is the platform we have chosen. It's not perfect, but our > gripes have more to do with form factor (it's 1RU, but it's a bit deeper than > what we'd like) and port densities (no mixed mode ports) than software or > features. We've been pretty pleased with it's feature set and performance, > but this hasn't seen any real world action, so who knows how that will turn > out. > > If you're asking more about a P router or P/PE hybrid, we've also just > ordered a few ASR9000s under try-and-buy as P/PEs to close up the chains of > ME3600s that will start to be deployed in our remote sites. A Juniper MX > would certainly work well here too, and it seems to interoperate rather well > with the ME3600s, so that's certainly an option, but for us, we think it will > work more in our favor to go with the ASRs in the core, but if not, we'd ship > them back under the try-and-buy and get Junipers instead. > > Hope that helps. >
