On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 9:05 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 19/Jun/20 14:50, Tim Durack wrote:
If y'all can deal with the BU, the Cat9k family is looking half-decent: MPLS PE/P, BGP L3VPN, BGP EVPN (VXLAN dataplane not MPLS) etc. UADP programmable pipeline ASIC, FIB ~200k, E-LLW, mandatory DNA license now covers software support...
Of course you do have to deal with a BU that lives in a parallel universe (SDA, LISP, NEAT etc) - but the hardware is the right price-perf, and IOS-XE is tolerable.
No large FIB today, but Cisco appears to be headed towards "Silicon One" for all of their platforms: RTC ASIC strapped over some HBM. The strategy is interesting: sell it as a chip, sell it whitebox, sell it fully packaged.
YMMV
I'd like to hear what Gert thinks, though. I'm sure he has a special place for the word "Catalyst" :-).
Oddly, if Silicon One is Cisco's future, that means IOS XE may be headed for the guillotine, in which case investing any further into an IOS XE platform could be dicey at best, egg-face at worst.
I could be wrong...
Mark.
It could be worse: Nexus ;-( There is another version of the future: 1. SP "Silicon One" IOS-XR 2. Enterprise "Silicon One" IOS-XE Same hardware, different software, features, licensing model etc. Silicon One looks like an interesting strategy: single ASIC for fixed, modular, fabric. Replace multiple internal and external ASIC family, compete with merchant, whitebox, MSDC etc. The Cisco 8000/8200 is not branded as NCS, which is BCM. I asked the NCS5/55k guys why they didn't use UADP. No good answer, although I suspect some big customer(s) were demanding BCM for their own programming needs. Maybe there were some memory bandwidth issues with UADP, which is what Q100 HBM is the answer for. -- Tim:>