[c-nsp] Cisco CRS-1

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, Denton, Gregory Y. wrote:

>            Could anyone provide any non-sensitive information regarding
> the CRS-1 platform?  We currently are a multi vendor shop with J-T640s
> as our primary bulk routers, yet we are seeing pressure from above to
> consider (heavily) introducing the CRS.

The last time I saw the CRS-1 in action, the one limitation I saw was that 
I believe the bandwidth between the linecards and the backplane was 40 
Gb/s, so that may be a limitation if you're looking for a high-density 
10GE solution.

IOS XR is pretty nice, and doesn't have a lot of the legacy cruft that's 
in older versions of IOS.  It does have some features (modular 
support, craft interface, XML support, support of "slash" notation for 
interface IP addresses, etc) that may eventually make it into wider use 
in traditional IOS builds.

Beyond that, if your J routers are doing everything you need them to do 
and the support all of the features you need, I'd have to question the 
pressure (presumably from layer 8 or higher) to go through the time, 
effort, and expense (all non-trivial) of fork-lifting your existing gear.

Just my $0.02 :)