Given that you are a Cisco shop and likely have a lot of O&M money spent to support that vendor I would suggest you look closely at the 7600's to replace your 7500's. Great for low to medium density of port aggregation and hence good $/port ratio. Ian -----Original Message----- From: bcm [mailto:bcm@inkline.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 1:11 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: GSR, 7600, Juniper M?, oh my! Hello all, I'm faced with a difficult decision. I work for a large multi-node regional ISP (and Cisco shop). In our largest nodes we've found the Cisco 7500 series routers to be at the end of their useful life due to the throughput generated by POS OC-3 feeds and 10,000+ broadband users whose traffic needs to be moved out of the node. Short of building a farm of 7500's the need to upgrade seems clear. But where to go? The Cisco GSR platform seems a logical choice, but their new 7600 series units are attractive for their cost. Juniper may also have a place at this end of the processing spectrum. I'd also like to ensure that the new platform supports doing CAR and ACLs at line rate, given the client base. I wanted to see what other operators in this situation have done, so I would appreciate anyone's input or insight into the pros and cons of these platforms or any other ideas as to how I can grow beyond the Cisco 7500.