Is it a necessity to terminate the layer 3 at the edge? You could get a 10Gbps switch and move it all back to a central location where you have your high end routers. It would then be terminated as a VLAN and be a router on a stick kind of topology. Could be a cheaper way to do it without taking MPLS all the way out to the edge. As Tim said above, I too was thinking about the Juniper ACX. The 5048/5096 model could suit your needs. They are primarily designed as layer 1(TDM)/2 backhaul devices and i'm not sure they can do a full table. They do have full JunOS MPLS features. Could be a way to use MPLS-TE to move the layer 2 back to a core location and terminate later 3 there. Would give you some flexibility over just doing ethernet stuff as I mentioned in the first paragraph. Hamish On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Daniel Rohan <drohan@gmail.com> wrote:
I work at a state REN and we are seeking a lead for a new edge device for on prem deployment at customer sites.
We currently deploy two classes of routers-- a high end and a low end. Both the high end and the low end use some of the standard edge features: MPLS-TE, MBGP, flowspec, vrf, PIM, etc. We deliver full tables over these devices to the customers that need them.
We recently finished a new ethernet procurement and have a large number of sites (~200) moving from <1Gbps in bandwidth to 1-10Gb in bandwidth. Our currently deployed low-end router can't handle these speeds and we can't afford to place our high end router at 200+ sites.
So, we're looking for a middle tier router to deploy. Something with 2+ SFP+ ports, software that can handle the aforementioned features, and something with an API that we can leverage for programmatic management.
So far we've not found anything that checks all the boxes. Layer 3 switches seem like obvious choices, but lack some of the features and RIB/FIB we need at the edge. Other devices like the Juniper MX5/10 certainly meet the requirements, but are priced way beyond what we can afford.
Any suggestions for devices we might have overlooked? Preferably in the less than 10K per unit price point. If such a magical device exists.
-Dan