[nsp] NPE-G1

[Streiner, Justin]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Charles Von Dartmooth wrote:

>    After reading the recent posts regarding the
> NPE-G1, I'm considering upgrading from an NPE-400 to a
> G1. Can someone who's done such an upgrade share what
> sort of performance increase they've seen? The router
> in question  is a 7206VXR pushing about 320Mbps
> (~80Kpps) from 1 PA-GE to another (straight IP nothing
> fancy) with no other cards. It does around 60-70% CPU
> doing this much BW. I'm looking to increase the amount
> of BW being pushed through the router and am wondering
> what I can expect the CPU % to drop to by just
> switching to the G1.

I had a 7206VXR with 2 DS3s, 8 or 9 T1s, 2 FEs and a GE on an NPE-300 w/
256 MB of RAM and various versions of IOS over its lifetime.  It would
drive at peak times around 250 Mb/s across the box, plus several (8-10)
full e/iBGP feeds and a largish OSPF database.  That amount of traffic
beat the NPE-300 up pretty badly - peaks at 100% were not uncommon.
Since putting the G1 in a few weeks and moving to a later 12.1S train
release, the CPU peaks at about 45% and normally sits in the 25-30% range.

I did run into some issues where certain cards, or certain spins of
certain cards, would cause the G1 to panic and return to rommon, or boot
directly into the rommon.  This was on a test router that did not have the
same cards as the production router I upgraded.

Bottom line: I've been very happy with the performance increase, though
I'm still looking at what the best options are beyond the capabilities of
the 7200VXR + NPE-G1 and figuring out how to sell my management on it
when the time comes, as the next steps from Cisco and the other two major
players are pretty pricy.

jms