[c-nsp] LNS alternative to 7200?

[John Elliot]

> 
> We are doing just this with a couple of 2851's - MPLS/BGP/OSPF/IPv6/NAT for a 
> small POP. The one 2851 I have in mind is maxed out with 1G third party 
> approved DRAM and also runs a full BGP table. Initially after boot it takes a 
> little while to munge the full BGP feed (3 or 4 mins from memory) but after that 
> it sits at a few percent CPU idle and happily does whatever else I need. Max it 
> gets up to is about 15% CPU during the day.
> 
> The GigE ports support >1500 MTU and MPLS works as expected. I have about 15 
> DSL services coming in over L2TP to it at the moment, I'd be happy to go to 
> perhaps 50 or so PPP sessions but after the POP grows past that size I figure we 
> can financially justify a much bigger device anyway.
> 
> Given the 2900 ISRs are now out I wouldn't bother putting in any more 2851s for 
> this purpose - just go the newer 2900 ISRs and be done with it. For much the 
> same $$ you get way way more throughput. I would be surprised if a 2951 ISR 
> won't be sufficient for your needs assuming feature parity with the 2851.
> 
> The only point of pain I have with this platform is the per-user QoS via RADIUS, 
> which is still broken in 12.4T, 15.0M and 15.1(2)T, but supposedly fixed soon 
> (CSCti80776). It has also been broken on the 7200 platform in 15.0M and later 
> 12.4T, so if that feature is super critical then you may want to choose 
> something which can run old code that is not affected by the bug.
> 
> These routers were not designed as an aggregation routers obviously and they 
> won't scale to anywhere near a 7200 or ASR, but IOS is IOS and everything we 
> need on the platform for this environment just pretty much works.
> 
> Reuben
> 


Awesome!  Thanks.