[c-nsp] Nexus 7707 as Internet Edge Router?

[adamv0025 at netconsultings.com]

> Rick Martin
> Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 11:03 PM
> 
> We have solicited quote from our local, and normally very trusted, Cisco
> partner for Internet Edge Router with 10X10G towards service provider and
> 2X40G towards our network. Current deployment will be two 2X10G LAG
> bundles to ISP's (40G), this will be replacing current MX104.
> 
> I did not specify what Cisco platform, I expected them to come back with
ASR
> 1006 or better. I did specifically state that I did not personally believe
that
> Nexus was the right platform - but they came back with a very low ball bid
on
> Nexus 7707. They knew they were up against Juniper MX platform...
> 
> I cannot find much on this particular router - um, switch online so I
would like
> to seek the knowledge of this group to see what your thoughts are on this
> platform for Internet edge router.
> 
> We only accept default from service provider (BGP) so route table size is
not
> currently an issue. We have the normal Internet edge stuff going on but
> nothing too heavy, no tunneling or other highly complex configuration.
> 
> We are virtually all Cisco in our statewide network and have a fair amount
of
> N9K serving us in the data center as well as customer Ethernet
aggregation.
> The only area Cisco has consistently  lost on our network for the past 10+
> years has been at our Internet edge locations (3 currently) so I believe
they
> are doing everything they can to win...
> 
Since you've been using what possibly is the worst carrier-grade BGP
implementation out there for past 10+ years and you're fine with it (junos,
if someone doesn't know what I mean), heck you'd be fine with anything I
guess. You haven't mentioned any edge filtering or traffic sampling so I
assume you're not doing those either, in which case, yeah a decent switch
that can do some BGP seems like the right solution, in other words why
spending money on functionality you don't need or care about, right? 

If you can handle the poor BGP implementation -which will eventually be ok
in 18 or 19 as things are in the pipeline, Juniper MX is good but only for
ISP market (single priority traffic). 
However Juniper MX is certainly not good fit for CSP market (mixing traffic
of different priorities in your backbone), well to be fair since the fix
from couple months ago you'll be able to configure it do the right thing at
least on wan input to trio, unfortunately from fabric direction it'll
remain, well, not optimal due to unwillingness to fix.  
So if the backbone is subject to DDoS attacks and carries traffic of
multiple priority levels, then stay away from Trio. 

ASR9k has stupidly long upgrade times but at least it's NPU and Fabric
architecture is basically alright.
The LACP QOS is a moot point, there's no right and wrong way of doing the
split. 


adam