[c-nsp] Replacing a 7206VXR w/ NPE-G1 with Sup720-3BXL w/ WS-X6408A-GBIC

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 04:49:12PM +0100, Matthew.Coleman-Hamilton at servicebirmingham.co.uk wrote:
> Thanks. I had (perhaps foolishly) assumed that moving from an NPE-G1 to a 
> Sup720-3BXL-based platform would represent an upgrade from the 7206VXR (as 
> well as having the advantage of bringing our Internet BGP tier in-line 
> with the rest of our core network from a hardware perspective).
> 
> When comparing the NPE-G1 to a Sup720-3BXL for the purposes of being an 
> internet-facing BGP router am I actually proposing a backwards step?

The CPU on the Sup720 is slower, so "load a full BGP table from 5 peers"
will take longer.

OTOH, "100% CPU due to BGP" on the Sup720 doesn't impact packet forwarding
capacity, as that's done by other bits of the hardware - so depending on
traffic mix and BGP churn (and number of peers) the Sup720 will vastly
outperform the NPE-G1 :-)

As a reference: we're currently using Sup720s as peering and upstream
routers, and we've been quite happy most of the time.

Major causes for unhappiness: software bugs (can happen on all platforms),
hardware limitations (some things the hardware just cannot do), political
issues inside Cisco (6500/7600 in-fighting).

gert
-- 
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
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