Joe Abley wrote:

Hi all,

An acquaintance who runs an ISP with an M7i on its border is looking to upgrade, because the M7i is starting to creak from all the flesh-tone MPEGs his customers are sharing. (How times have changed. Back when I was chasing packets, it was flesh-tone JPEGs.)

He's looking at the MX480 and the E300.

The MX480 is attractive because the M7i has been stable as a rock, and he's familiar with JUNOS.

The E300 is attractive because it's half the price of the MX480, and has the potential to hold layer-2 cards as well as layer-3 ports which makes the price per port much more reasonable than the MX480. But he has no experience with Force10 at any ISO layer higher than 2.

He doesn't have any exotic requirements beyond OSPF, OSPFv3, BGP, IP and IPv6. There's no MPLS in the picture, for example. However, he's going to want four or five full tables plus a moderate load of peering routes in there. And maybe VRRP.

Thoughts from people who have tried one or the other, or both? Or who have faced this kind of problem, and came up with a different answer?

Feel free to send mail off-list; I can summarise if there is interest.

Joe

I would avoid Force10 if at all possible. In the network I managed I've had some fairly surprising stability problems with their S series switches and feature problems (or lack there of) on their E series. Things you kind of scratch your head at and wonder what they were thinking. Juniper on the other hand is indeed a bit pricier but quite a stable platform. If he has to look at alternatives I would suggest Foundry, either the RX-8, MLX-8, or XMR-8000 (depending on requirements) for comparable models to the MX480. Regards, Chris