On Jun 19, 2020, at 08:06, 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...
never underestimate the desire of product managers and engineering teams to have their own petri dishes to swim around in. -- steve ulrich (sulrich@botwerks.*)