We're stuck in an engineering pickle, so some experience from this crew would be useful in tie-breaking... We operate a business-grade FTTx ISP with ~75 customers and 800Mbps of Internet traffic, currently using 6509/Sup2s for core routing and port aggregation. The MSFC2s are under stress from 3x full route feeds, pared down to 85% to fit the TCAM tables. One system has a FlexWAN with an OC3 card and it's crushing the CPU on the MSFC2. System tuning (stable IOS and esp. disabling SPD) helped a lot but still doesn't have the power to pull through. Hardware upgrades are needed... We need true full routes and more CPU horsepower for crunching BGP (+12 smaller peers + ISIS). OC3 interfaces are going to be mandatory, one each at two locations. Oh yeah, we're still a larger startup without endless pockets. Power, rack space, and SmartNet are not concerns at any location (on-site cold spares). We may need an upstream OC12 in the future but that's a ways out and not a concern here. Our engineering team has settled on three $20k/node options: - Sup720-3BXLs with PS and fan upgrades - Sup2s as switches + ISIS + statics and no BGP, push BGP edge routing off to NPE-G2s across a 2-3Gbps port-channel - Sup2s as switches + ISIS + statics and no BGP, push BGP edge routing off to a 12008 with E3 engines across a 2-3Gbps port-channel. Ideas and constructive opinions welcome, especially software and stability-related. Many thanks, -Dave