On Tue Jul 27, 2021 at 01:23:36PM +0000, Andy Hunter wrote: > We are upgrading our network to accommodate 100Gb, and are replacing our > existing Cisco infrastructure, whilst investigating this we have been seduced > with the power vs capability of the Juniper vs Cisco Question.
I went around this loop in 2018/2019, looking to upgrade our aged 6500 based network to support 100G. > For us this is between Juniper MX480 / 960 Premium models vs Cisco ASR 9006. That's where I ended up, too. The ASR9006 is long in the tooth now, you probably want to be looking at the ASR99xx range, unless you're looking at refurbished kit. > My question is twofold ? What are other people using, and have you got any > gotchas to keep an eye out for, and, are we missing any other vendors. When I did this process, I found that the MX480 / ASR9k ended up at similar price points, both above what we felt was 'value for money' at the time. Both were very capable of meeting our feature needs. Then, about the same time, Juniper launched the MX204 and MX10003. These turned out to be real game changers for us, and we invested in both models (at edge and core respectively). The price point was much lower than the traditional MX480 range, and actually ended up exceeding our cost expectations. Sure, on those platforms you need to keep an eye on port combination limitations (e.g. the MX204 has 400Gbps of silicon throughput, but 480Gbps of ports, so you have to 'give up' one of the 100G ports if you want to use the 10G ports - and similar limits on the MX10k), but we were very happy with them. Of course, other vendors are available - some like the Nokia 7750 range, others like the 'white box' and/or Broadcom chipset route (Arista and others), but you need to keep an eye on feature availability and maturity to see if it fits your requirements (when we were looking, we found them lacking in MPLS/VPLS support, but I believe that's there now). Hope this helps, Simon
