[nsp] 7600 and sup720 vs. rsp720?

[Antoine Versini]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003 sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:

> > Very interesting. How are people finding the 7600?
>
> If you can forget the marketing, the 7600 is actually a pretty nice
> box. I tend to simply think of it as 6500 + OSMs. We use it for MPLS.

One can add that in order to use OSMs or DFCs in a 6500, you need to run
that «native IOS» stuff also called «integrated IOS» that leads in
catastrophic recovery times for the system to switch to the standby SUP in
the case of an active SUP crash. Compared to the few seconds needed by an
«hybrid» box to recover from the same disaster, I prefer to keep my good
old CatOS + MSFC-IOS stuff and plug POS interfaces in GSR...

On the same SUP720+MSFC3+PFC3 hardware, the native mode configured for
RPR+ took 80 seconds to start forwarding traffic again after removing the
active SUP (running 12.2(14)SX1) but only took 4 seconds to achieve the
same in hybrid configured for single-router mode (with CatOS 8.1(1) on the
SUP720 and 12.2(14)SX2 on the MSFC3).

When will NSF/SSO be implemented on the integrated IOS for the 6500/7600 ?
My CISCO representative told me something I can translate by «not before a
long time». I find this rather difficult to accept since the NSF/SSO code
has done well for the past few months here on the GSRs and seems to be a
proven technology. For me the choice is : «if you want to uses OSMs or
DFCs daughterboards on your modules, forget about high availability». Or
perhaps will the OSMs and DFCs be supported by the hybrid mode ?

Regards,
Antoine.

-- 
Antoine Versini
IP Networks Project Manager / T-Online France - Club-Internet