On (2014-07-30 08:06 -0500), Jimmy Hess wrote:
Keep in mind most of the MX series makes the 6500 look like a 5 port linksys home router, when it comes to carrying around and managing large BGP tables; both in terms of prefix capacity, speed, the policy/filtering/configuration management functionality of the OS, and how they will take the route update "beating" during setup of new multiple BGP sessions...
The SUP2T is about a 100% increase in TCAM size, but still pretty limited in terms of system resources.
You can also "protect" your investment if appropriate by taking this late 1990s gear off your BGP edge, or otherwise recruiting it for a role which it is more suited for in this day and age, where it is not handling full tables and thus the feeble amount of FIB size, CPU, memory are no potential hinderance now or on the next 10 years.
These seem cute anecdotes but I'm not sure how appropriate they are. CAT6880 is XEON control-plane, and if we compare MX80 and RSP720, where RSP720 has slightly lower performance CPU, RSP720 out-performs MX80 (and MX104) in BGP convergence and BGP scale. Certainly if you compare SUP720 to XEON MX960, your anecdote is accurate. JunOS is architecturally quite similar to IOS-XE, single fat process (iosd, rpd) doing all the relevant work, running on modern control-plane (linux, freebsd). One advantage to iosd is, that it's actually multithreaded unlike rpd. Obviously Sup2T/6880 2M FIB is limited, but what is JNPR MX scale? Trio has 256MB RLDRAM for everything, looking at my MX IPv4 FIB memory consumption divided by entry size, it pegs IPv4 entry to 77B (seems massive), which would translate to 3.5M IPv4 FIB upper bound, if nothing else is there. Realistically, I don't think JNPR promises anywhere near this. So the FIB scale may be pretty similar in both. So I don't think FIB, control-plane or software are selling-points here. Where MX shines, is deep services, with CAT you have relatively dumb ASIC, while MX is capable for very deep services with its NPU. If you can reuse existing LC and skill investment while living with limited forwarding-plane functionality offered, it seems entirely sensible solution, and in no way more '90s technology' than MX. If you need deep services, of course it's wrong box, then MX or ASR9k is what you should be looking at. -- ++ytti