Alexander is right, Junipers are fine backbone routers and have many avantages over Cisco. The M7i is "officially" positioned as a Cisco 7200 replacement, so it must be somewhere in the same price range. The look&feel is somewhat different, but practically everybody I talk to likes the Juniper software much better than Cisco's. (Compared to IOS, JUNOS seems to have a higher rate of new features coupled with a lower rate of new bugs :-)
A minimal box from Cisco to fill your requirements would probably be a 7204VXR with the NPE-G1 processor board. The NPE-G1 has three onboard GigE ports, each of which can be equipped with a GBIC (otherwise you can directly plug a Cat5 cable into each 10/100/1000 port). Packet forwarding performance will probably not be as good as the Junipers, because the Junipers do forwarding in ASICs (both IPv4 and IPv6!), while on these Cisco boxes this is done by the same (but decently fast) general-purpose CPU that processes all the updates to your Glorious Full Routing Table. But you should be fine as long as you're not running your GigE links at capacity and there are no high-packet-rate (D)DoS attacks. If you don't need a full table, the Catalyst 3750 might be an interesting alternative - this one DOES forwarding in hardware, but has a small FIB. If you don't care so much about price and want a really fast small box (with 10GbE upgrade path), look at the Cisco 7603 OSR. Please don't misinterpret this as a recommendation for Cisco against Juniper - as I said Juniper makes fine boxes - but since you asked about Cisco and I'm more familiar with them... -- Simon. ---------------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Maillist-Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/swinog%40swinog.ch/
