Richard J. Sears wrote: I am looking at upgrading my current 7507 backbone routers. Each of my routers has dual RSP4s
Keep in mind that dual RSP does _not_ mean load sharing; it's for redundancy, if you can get RPR+ to work the way you want that is.
and I was thinking of upgrading them to RSP8s when I started reading about the new 7206VXRs with the NPE-G1 engine. I was wondering if anyone has had experience with this router/engine combination, how well they perform in comparison to the RSP8s and actual total traffic capabilities when utilizing all three gig ports with a mixture of OC3, Gig and DS3 connections as well.
In my experience, no 7507 is capable of this, nor a 7206VXR. As pointed out not too long ago, the RSP8 although intrinsically slower than a NPE-G1 will take more load because a lot of processing can be done by the VIPs in the 7507. The deal is that in a 7200 the NPE does the work of the RSP _plus_ the work of three VIPs; even if it's faster, it might not be that fast. That being said, I don't consider reasonable to get gig+ traffic trough a 7507; in my experience a 7500 will push 500mbps of traffic but will have trouble swallowing a full gig. My limited experience with the 7206 says that it might eventually be able to push _one_ gig from one PA to another, but not aggregate: say you have 4 or 5 OC3s aggregating into a GigE with some ACLs (which would run distributed on a 7500) I don't think that even the NPE-G1 is up to the task. IMHO, if you stay well below a gig, these el-cheapo eBay RSP8 deals are a valid solution but if you go over, GSR or Juniper is your answer. The 7200 has never been a core nor backbone router. Michel.